<> 


Seeatsey 3 


rpri=ea: 
pacraeaetes 


reenronerete see 


Seststt 


wetwntstr econ’. 


(ororr se teeters: Seeees 
; 


eee aT 


atl peer saes 


. “ vo 
? reales toter 
VARGA. 7 +. 
itary Srxe? < 
Stes 
etre ees 


=! 
em He 
VES 
Rate rte tyr rpatrereas 
Peete! 
~ fo Restart ractcre Ceeetnye ee eeantrae 
: poceretecerunereeures 
ES = 7 cares 
rok terns =e 
rs roe j- Gaby Gurl a Se ee 
Testes 


etiieores 


Peete aote 
SSIS ESS SESE + 
etapa: ¥ re Sane Te 


eer ee eee y eee ee Seats 
EE SSE 


3 
St ettgtt 
SRN Pn 


Seeeent f° 
peste 
See eee 


waa 


eater er eer oe ee roe 
Serr 
etek 

= 


kpebeey Sag eee ae ete raphy ag 

pares ps ee see ees 
mpbrer rere e Orr ey er erec or sey 

Matetetetestt : 

rersreres pire ety 

5 > -. 


G 
ee ES 
SS a 
poe heh parecer 

eres 


ceed 


aes 


= 
Si mete hates 


Sods!» Cpeelemens secee 
=; . 
i 
ces) 


| be 
teak | ee henge ~ 
Ue Pe SS 
* 4 Pererer et taeeureg ote 


SFR pS cote ns 
Sone 
ast ete yeeros bee 
piaaes topes eeu Geese gt 
hats 


wee bmerdrensa bs sone 


Seater 
Pecoreenine 


Sota 


“ aie Pulse certere-¥ ewer eget ey att Prettrocser) te iets 


“Sree 


* 
2 


if 


retraite tees 
Moa reres sr erey 


tak 


3 
ep ier ny boners ear fe wren pas eeeaye bes reeies 
pas Gores ares esas tes OR a Ta 
Shite et eect 
ara bliner eee 
Sr srpe ere seer ete hit Beet ee 
Ee Se ed a et eat eee nena yor ares 
- bntnectedrisbseeecente eee 
he ted Speciale troy 18 extra ete f operetay a 
Retatete shiny eie es oretety met aera on 
aeaeeetereeet ort Sen aae er tenrt at er erererresere 
cas apy ates o err reer eters 
rer epereeey ee ret Tete eet et ts 
De Seteerhting tee sesrttqutceseciserieerersres 
hatroapreats red roan 


“Tr, 

nati ; tetaiete ey % 
; 

tee 3 cores < ; terse 

ite 


Vaan ene mingedmtngegmenesen gs inerette gee 
cart Birra Nom te Re: etm tame Gm ae Dom 


ba seo N tat St hae 


SSS SSS 
Site La titees pee ee Watetot ete 
erates abate rg yer tee y eee y tt eer | 
As i etartat area? 
Perereaheprorerns 
hitas grec: 
cat 


Sec aaehiashetrcoieenkatats 


piledie | | ~ ee bee baete-y . a ee nO 0 be ee Oe ee re Om On mn te . 
Pa heen tape nrg iets gy yte ys gt EET poste 
Beat te eq ek tates iret en yey ertyrepe peer eer eT: % 
ita brice eerste eeee 
setts 


seek eee eet 
Say Ene Pe 
eset er eereres sis 


snk = 
rae tii 








BR 125 .W54 1924 | 

Wilson, Philip Whitwell, Be) 
Soy hey | 

A layman's confession of 
faith 


fae 
(tenet 


a4 


\ ‘ ait 
i 7 
=n eee aR'S 





Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/laymansconfessioO0wils 


A LAYMAN’S CONFESSION OF FAITH 


P. Whitwell Wilson’s 


UNFORGETABLE BOOKS 


The Christ We Forget 
Student’s Pocket Edition, Thin Paper. ... 
Thirteenth Edition. 8vo 

Dr. F. Wilbur Chapman, shortly before his death, 
said; “One of the greatest books I’ve ever read. It 


ought to be in every minister’s hands, Is there not 
somé way to arrange it?” 


The Church We Forget 
Second Edition. 8vo. 
Homiletic Review : “ For themes, for illustrations, 


for accumulations of suggestion for talk or lecture— 
we have seen few books that promise more.” 


The Viston We Forget 


A Layman’s Reading of the Book of Revelation. 
Second Edition, 8vo 


“Employs the suggestive method of interpretation 
and develops it more fully than other writers have at- 
tempted. Here is a masterpiece of poetry, eloquence 
and inspiration.” — Boston Transcript, 








f ; 
. 4 
eae 193] ‘ 
#s'p yy igh ~S 
he fa f A . 


A Layman’s Confess 


of Faith 


By y 


P. WHITWELL WILSON 


Author of ‘‘The Christ We Forget; ‘‘The Church 
We Forget; ‘The Vision We Forget,”’ Ete. 





New York CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LoNDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, 1924, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


Printed in the United States of America 


New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street 


The Statement of the Case 
M ANY years ago, the late Sir Edward 


Creasy wrote a book, entitled Fifteen 

Decisive Battles of the World. In these 
pages, I have dealt with fifteen decisive questions 
of the world. Of every chapter, the title is such a 
question, and taken as a whole, the answers are a 
confession of faith. | 

Every answer has meant a decisive battle in 
myself. Many a time have I been inclined to drop 
the subject, to live easily and cheaply amid a fading 
faith, in which the very twilight would mean a 
relief from temptation and repentance, and a sur- 
render to the usual cheap and shallow generalities. 
But I knew that it would be a surrender, that life 
would be poorer afterwards, and that however la- 
mentable my failure to be a Christian, I should 
have been a worse failure as a man, had I not tried 
to be what I might have been. 

Merely to be self-deceived, would have been no 
use to a writer for the press. If I was to have a 
faith at all, it must be a faith for which, Sunday 
and weekday, I could give a reasonable explanation. 
And, after years of delay, I have made time, amid 
the urgent claims of a busy and uncertain profes- 
sion, to put the case in brief and simple terms. 


5 


6 THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE 


If I am under a delusion, then prove it. If there 
is here no delusion, then I claim the verdict for 
Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. I know of no per- 
son with the Christ who is as unhappy as multi- 
tudes of persons who have not the Christ. 

They who reduce faith to negatives should read 
history. ‘Two hundred years ago, many Presby- 
terian Churches in England became frankly Uni- 
tarian and the Lord Shaftesbury of that day 
scoffed at the Scriptures as “ witty and humourous 
books.’ Politics were corrupt. The Prime Min- 
ister said that every man had his price. The mar- 
riage vow was ignored. And efforts to stop 
indulgence in liquor failed. Openly it was stated 
that the Christian Faith had become a thing of 
the past. 

What followed was the unparalleled revival, 
indeed explosion of faith, under the Wesleys and 
Whitefield. And the Negatives were positived by 
Methodism. 

One hundred years ago, Unitarianism swept over 
a New England. And again, the Negatives were 
positived by explosions of faith, some will say the 
imperfectly directed faiths of Christian Science and 
of Mormonism. Some belief—more definite than 
the Negatives—was essential. 

Today again, the Negatives seem to flow like a 
flood over a submerged faith. But again, the Posi- 
tives—call them what you like—are exploding. 
There is Fundamentalism. ‘There is also Spiritual- 


THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE 7 


ism. And, for the first time in England, there are 
British Moslems who prefer Mohammedanism 
with Mohammed to Christianity without Christ. 
And never has the Church of Rome issued a more 
triumphant challenge to a wavering Protestantism. 
In Britain, the two churches that gain ground are 
the Roman Church and the High Anglican Church. 

That there will be definite faiths among men, 
may be taken for granted. The battle of the Nega- 
tives is ever a losing battle. The real danger is 
not Scepticism but that Scepticism, by destroying 
a reasonable faith, will provoke Superstition and 
Sensation. What we need is a clear view of Christ 
Himself, of what He meant by the Church, the 
Bible, the Home, the Past and the Future. To see 
Him in the Scriptures, in events, in others, has 
been my struggling endeavour. To show Him, is 
once more my imperfect attempt. 

As a servant, I welcome Science; as a master— 
never. In 1870, there were declared two infalli- 
bilities—first, of the Pope, and secondly, of Charles 
Darwin. Both these infallible authorities were 
dogmatists. And no Pope was ever a more 
despotic dogmatist than the zealots of Darwin. 
For half a century, the Christian who withheld his 
assent from the proposition that species originated 
in and were differentiated by natural selection or 
the survival of the fittest was written down 
promptly and finally as an obscurantist. The 
Philosophy of such survival of the fittest made 


8 THE STATEMENT OF THE CASE 


modern Germany and was the underlying delusion 
that provoked the war. Today, the infallibilities of 
Darwin are dismissed by Science herself as no 
more proven than the theories of Lucretius; and the 
origin of species is declared—again by Science—to 
be as mythical as the pedigree of Homer’s heroes. 
These are not the statements of the Church; they 
are the declarations of the highest authorities on 
what has been called Evolution. 

As long as hypothetical Science consists in the 
main of unlearning the hypothetical Science of the 
past generation, | am compelled to suspend my 
acceptance of theories which have often been no 
more than intellectual fashions. Revelation, intel- 
ligently received, has stood the test of thousands 
of years. After half a century, Evolution, as pro- 
mulgated by Science, is on its defence—is indeed 
confessedly reduced to an indeterminate. 

Amid it all, [ am glad that I can count on a 
Friend Who does know and can guide and will 
preserve to the end that frail and faltering soul 
which I have committed to His care. To His wis- 
dom, His love and His power, I can assign no limit. 
And in His teaching, happily, I can find nothing 
that anybody has ever had to unlearn. 


P. W. W. 
New York, N.Y. 


Contents 


. Wo Is Curist? 

. Wuat Is A CHURCH? 

. Wuy READ THE BIBLE? 

. Is THE BrpLuE INSPIRED? . 

. Dip MrracitEs Occur? 

. How Was Curist Born? 

. Can Curist SAVE? 

. Is Happiness WRONG? 

. CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A Livinc? 
. DoEs SCIENCE UPSET FarrH? 

. CAN THE Home BE PRESERVED? 
. Wit, Wars Ever CEASE? 

. Dip Curist Risk FROM THE DEAD? 
. WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? . 


. Is tas Trinrty A MytH? 


11 
22 
31 
43 
57 
68 
83 
97 


5 BOY 
wy Let 
id 
abe 
LOO 
nba 
PLoS 


i 
by k 
t % | 
i ty Ky Ly) 
fas) aS ie 


en ie) 


ity 


inte 





I 
WHO IS CHRIST? 


HOSE of us who desire to follow the Christ 
Ap in His leadership of love for the human 
race are told by St. Peter that we should be 
ever ready to give an answer to any who ask us the 
reason for the hope that is in us. Even a layman 
must do his best to fulfil this command, living as he 
does in an era when the faith of many who profess 
and call themselves Christians is shaken. I am a 
plain man who has only one life to live and wants 
that life to be worth living; and it is for plain men 
and women that I offer this statement of what I 
believe. We cannot live our lives in perpetual 
chaos. We cannot feed our souls on mere argu- 
ment and controversy. The Gospel is not a theo- 
logical ball game but redemption. And the best 
defence of it is simply to know what it means. 

For it is not in Christendom alone that religion 
is challenged. The authority of Moses in the syna- 
gogue, of Buddha in the temple, of Mohammed in 
the mosque and of Confucius in the shrine is also 
menaced, and throughout the world, an increasing 
number of people appear to believe in anything or 
nothing. The question is thus not simply whether 


11 


12 WHO IS CHRIST? 


the Christian Faith is to disappear but whether all 
faith is to be shattered. Is mankind to progress 
without any appreciation of the Unseen? ‘That is 
the issue. 

At first glance, it seems deplorable that the 
Church whose “‘ one foundation is Jesus Christ the 
Lord” should be divided into sects, and that some 
of the sects should be rent by faction. Where the 
Holy Spirit should be present in the Church to 
guide the humble and contrite in heart unto all 
truth, we see the tenderest mysteries of Our Lord’s 
birth, life and death, debated like politics, one side 
claiming a victory over the other, as if this were 
the imitation of Christ. It is not science. It is not 
orthodoxy. It is not enlightenment. It is the in- 
evitable result of those cares of this world, that 
deceitfulness of riches which spring up and choke 
the Word of God. But, after all, as St. Paul real- 
ised in his day, the turmoil is not wholly a disaster. 
What if some do preach Christ of envy and strife? 
It only means that whether in pretence or in truth, 
Christ is preached. “I therein do rejoice,” wrote 
St. Paul, ‘ yea, and will rejoice.” 

The fact that, one hundred and fifty years after 
Voltaire, a discussion of the scenes at Bethlehem 
should occupy more space in the press of the 
United States than the most sensational of all prize 
fights shows that the progress of science and the 
development of railroads, machinery, telegraphs, 
radio, automobiles have changed in no way the 


WHO IS CHRIST? 18 


inescapable fascination of the question, “ Whom 
do men say that lam?” Indeed, it seems as if He 
‘were coming to us closer than ever before. Some 
have accepted Him on the authority of the Church 
and that was good; others accepted Him on the 
authority of the Bible and that, perhaps, was 
better; but best of all will it ever be to find Him 
ourselves, to see Him as He is, so that if all the 
Churches were bombed and if all the Bibles were 
burned, we would still have Him, “nearer than 
hands and feet.” Amid this crisis we are learning 
that churches and creeds and confessions and cate- 
chisms are not enough. To live the Christian life, 
if that life is to be worth living, must be Christ 
Himself. 

That other prophets than Christ have arisen— 
prophets widely advertised among intellectuals—I 
freely admit. Asa writer for the newspapers, I do 
not close my eyes to what is published day by day 
in this twentieth century. Nor need we be taken 
by surprise. It is the Bible that forewarned us of 
what we ought to expect. In the Sermon on the 
Mount, which we usually take for granted, Our 
Lord tells us to “ beware of false prophets,” and it 
is a hint repeated by His most trusted spokesmen, 
St. Peter and St. John. The present situation, 
however difficult it be, ought not to disturb us, 
therefore; our Master prepared us for it. Nor are 
we called upon to deny a full hearing to any 
prophet who tells us that he has something of truth 


14 WHO IS CHRIST? 


to declare. ‘There was a moment, doubtless, when 
St. John as a young man, “a son of thunder,” was 
ready to call down fire from heaven on those who 
thought amiss, but in his old age he was wiser and 
wrote that, while we should not “believe every 
spirit,” we should “ try the spirits whether they are 
of God.” ‘The most mystical of the Apostles thus 
asserted not only the right but the duty of applying 
a private judgment to all the seething speculations 
of his own day. The Cause was to be defended, 
not by suppressing attacks upon it, but by examin- 
ing them. Each criticism of the Christ and each 
alternative to Him was to be put on trial before a 
calm and judicial mind and so weighed on its 
merits. Nothing in science was to be more utterly 
scientific than the progress and explanation of 
faith. The Spirit which should rule over such a 
confession was God; and God was defined as 
Light, in whom is no darkness at all; as Love, 
expressed in love for one’s neighbour; as Truth, 
in which can lurk no lie. If we are to see clearly 
what is given to the world in Christ, we must rid 
our minds at the outset of all prejudice, all resent- 
ment, all desire for a merely dialectical advantage 
over our neighbours. Even in our creeds, we must 
be like Him Who was content to be made of no 
reputation. 

Take the modern prophet. He may be Ibsen. 
He may be Wells. He may be Galsworthy. He 
may be Gorky or he may be Shaw. Does he, or 


WHO IS CHRIST? 15 


does he not, rank with Christ? These prophets 
have had a publicity that Christ never sought. 
They have had at their disposal all the resources 
of the printing press, the theatre, the universities. 
And they have already failed and the decline of 
their vogue is evident. ‘The explanation of their 
failure is simple. All they have been able to do 1s 
to diagnose, advertise or ridicule human disease. 
The remedy is beyond them. Analyse Ibsen’s 
plays. Summed up, they are no more than the 
exclamation of the Psalmist that all men are liars, 
and of St. Paul’s statement to the Romans that 
there is none righteous, no, not one. Eliminate the 
Christ, and you are left with such pessimism, 
darkly illuminated by satire, by cynicism, and 
sometimes by the gross sensuality of a Leon 
Daudet. In this era of education, it is at least one 
point, now clear, that no other Saviour than Christ 
can be or has been suggested. It is still Jesus of 
Nazareth, or nihilism. 

Consider this illustration. ‘Two plays have been 
written on the troublous animosity which too often 
divides the Jew from the Gentile. The first of 
these plays is The Merchant of Venice, by Wil- 
liam Shakespeare. The second is Loyalties, by 
John Galsworthy. In the one case, it was shown 
that commerce provided no remedy for racial ani- 
mosity. In the other case, where the Jew was a 
rich young man introduced into English society, it 
was made equally evident that pleasure would not 


16 WHO IS CHRIST? 


heal the wound. Both Galsworthy and Shakes- 
peare, therefore, left the problem unsolved, not 
realising any common ground where there would 
be neither Jew nor Gentile, Barbarian, Scythian, 
bond nor free. In Christ, such reconciliation is 
possible. And why? Because Christ is greater 
than commerce and pleasure; He is incarnate 
service. It is in serving mankind that the opposites 
in opinion and blood are drawn together. If Shy- 
lock and the Venetians had served together on the 
committee of a hospital where Jews and Catholics 
were treated by Catholic and Jewish doctors and 
nurses, the world would have heard nothing of 
that pound of flesh. The racial problem would 
have been solved. 

We have no reason, then, to fear the study of 
comparative religion. That study did not begin in 
theological colleges, however modern, but on the 
Mount of ‘Transfiguration where Jesus, with 
Moses and Elijah, together compared religion. 
By all means, let Buddha, let Mohammed, let 
Confucius, let Tolstoy, let Gandhi, join that com- 
pany and talk face to face with Christ. For the 
moment, the Godhead may seem to be enveloped in 
a cloud of a divine uncertainty, but in due course, 
we shall again see Jesus only; and matched with 
Him, the rest are nowhere. Suppose it be true 
that Christ is belittled—that He is a stone set at 
nought of the builders—the statesmen, the think- 
ers, the scientists, who construct the civilisation 


WHO IS CHRIST? 17 


that is not wholly a success. The fact remains that 
“there is none other name under heaven given 
among men, whereby we must be saved.” It was 
said by Peter and John nineteen centuries ago. 
And it is still to be said today by anyone who reads 
the newspapers. If you are satisfied with cyni- 
cism, with pessimism, with sensation, with pleas- 
ure, you may obtain these from others than Christ, 
but if you are in pursuit of that something further 
which He called heaven and we call happiness, an 
inward peace which passeth understanding and a 
life more abundant than sophistication, it is to 
Christ alone that, after all experiment, you must 
resort. No one else even pretends to offer so great 
a salvation. 

At the outset, then, our enquiry is much simpli- 
fied. We need not consider anyone but Christ. 
With Him stands or falls the good in all others, 
and by Him, all others should be tested. “ Whom 
do men say that I am?” is thus the eternal ques- 
tion, and to this question He explained to us that 
different answers would be given. Some would 
see in Christ the prophet or teacher. Others would 
see in Him the righteous man or example. Their 
belief is that Christ as example may still be a man, 
a mere man, a good man, doubtless the best of men; 
indeed, the perfect man. This is the Christ of the 
man who cannot accept His “ full-orbed”’ Di- 
vinity. As He foresaw other things, so did 
He foresee the faith of a Martineau and an 


18 WHO IS CHRIST? 


Emerson—of those “ Liberals’? who discover in 
Christ simply a Judaic Rabbi—and of Renan 
and numerous biographers of Jesus who belong 
to his school. 

And as He loved all men, so did He love such 
men. As He was fair to all men, so was He fair 
to the man who said that, despite His claims, He 
was only man. He did not send him to hell. 
He did not refuse to eat with him; from Simon 
the Pharisee who entertained Him merely as a 
man, He asked no more than the usual courtesies 
extended to a human guest, that His feet be washed 
and His head anointed with oil. Indeed, He ex- 
pressly stated that anyone receiving a prophet, in 
the name of a prophet, shall have the prophet’s 
reward,—no more, no less. And anyone receiving 
a righteous man in the name of a righteous man 
shall have a righteous man’s reward—no more and 
no less.. To such an one, therefore, whatever he 
may call himself and in whatever church he may be 
found, Christ offers all that the believer will 
accept. But He also makes it plain that whoso- 
ever receives Him without such reservations will 
receive the God Who sent Him; in other words, 
that the riches of Christ are unsearchable. Ac- 
cording to your faith, then, will it be unto you. 
He does not force you to believe on Him, but He 
makes it clear that you cannot believe on Him too 
much. What He can do for you is a bank that 
you cannot break. And they who limit the Christ 


WHO IS CHRIST? 19 


are thus writing down their own assets. They are 
impoverishing their higher life. 

For what is faith? It is not a theory. It is not 
a proof. It is defined in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews as “seeing the invisible.’ In other 
words, faith is eyesight. And sight is instan- 
taneous. You see a thing or you do not see it; 
that is the question. What I see of this sheet of 
paper is not a matter of argument. The paper is 
here and so am I and I see the paper. Similarly, 
Christ is here and so am I and I see the Christ. 
That is faith. 

Imagine a portrait on your wall. A man comes 
into your room and tells you that he cannot see it. 
You then know that he is blind. Another man 
comes in and says that it is a beautiful study in 
sepia. You then know that he is colour-blind. He 
can distinguish between the light and the shade but 
he cannot see the rainbow. A third man comes in 
and admires the blue of a feather and the red of a 
ruby and you know that he has normal eyesight. 
And a fourth man distinguishes the colours, even 
when they are intermingled, discovering exquisite 
trinities of radiance, and in him you have the 
artist. So with the knowledge of Christ. Some 
see Him not at all. Others only see Him in 
monochrome, a man, unadorned by divinity. 
Others again recognise the divinity but describe it 
in crude terms. And there are a few who can 
perceive the very strokes of the Supreme Artist 


20 WHO IS CHRIST? 


and can define the Christ in His fullness, as did 
Paul, fathoming subtleties of significance of which 
the rest of us are unconscious. Such are the saints 
and the mystics who sometimes frame the creeds 
and sing us our hymns. | 

It is with Christ as with music. Some are deaf 
and hear it not at all. Others hear a noise only and 
cannot tell the tune. They are not deaf but only 
tone deaf. Others again can tell the tune but are 
unable to write it into notes. They are like the 
Christians who worship Christ but have no use for 
dogmas. And there are a few who can distinguish 
concurrent melodies and analyse harmonies, finding 
in them not music alone but language, and these 
again are the mystics and saints who can put the 
Christ into words. It is no use arguing with a 
man who is blind or deaf. It is absurd to perse- 
cute him. If he has neither sight nor hearing, 
there is surely a language that he will understand 
and that language is touch. When words fail, try 
deeds. In the medieval era, the deed was perse- 
cution. The heretic was tortured and burned. 
When Jesus was arrested and Peter with his 
sword smote off the ear of the High Priest’s 
servant, Malchus, Our Lord’s touch healed the 
ear and His saying as they bound Him, “ Suffer 
ye thus far,” was in its exquisite irony, perhaps 
the most unanswerable proof of the authentic 
miracle. For no one could have invented at once 
that human word and that divine deed, Our 


WHO IS CHRIST? 21 


neighbours may seem to be unable to hear what, 
as we think, Christ is saying, or to see what, as 
we think, He is doing, but they can feel; they 
have sinned and need pardon; in sympathy, in 


service, in sacrifice, we can still show them the 
Christ. 


IT 
WHAT IS A CHURCH? 


F I am asked to what Church I belong, I hardly 
know what to reply. In one sense, I belong to 
no Church; in another sense, I belong to every — 

Church. ‘Terms like Catholic, Protestant, Method- 
ist, Baptist and so on, mean little to me for I find 
none of them in the New Testament. In the days 
of the Apostles, there was no Church except the 
Church of Christ, and how to find that Church was 
simple. ‘Where two or three are gathered to- 
gether in my name,” said Our Lord, “there am I 
in the midst.” Whenever and wherever we meet 
and think of Him, there is He with us, a present 
Friend. With the disciples thus awaiting Him at 
Jerusalem, the tomb itself could not shut Him in, 
and the closed door of the upper room could not 
shut Him out. Doubtless it was miracle, but the 
miracle was a higher law. Amid the forces of 
nature, His love was an omnipotent force. It was 
God Himself for God is Love. And this is the 
reason why St. Paul declares to us “that neither 
death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor 
height nor depth nor any other creature shall be 


22 


WHAT IS A CHURCH? 28 


able to separate us from the love of God which is 
in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

Mankind is gregarious. We have our clubs and 
colleges and trade unions; and Christ also is hospi- 
table. He brings us into His banqueting house and 
His banner over us is love. His spiritual fellow- 
ship can never be shattered or shaken. While the 
shells of modern science burst over the ancient 
cathedrals of faith, the Church was discovered in 
the unconsecrated timbers of a “Y” hut. In no 
plainer characters could its charter be engrossed 
than these—that it is the presence of Christ among 
men. ‘To those who question His birth, His death, 
His resurrection, His ascension, He comes with the 
simple request that at least His presence be ad- 
mitted amongst us. He stands at the door and 
knocks. 

Hence one may find Him with equal certainty 
in a meeting of Quakers where is silence, or at a 
Roman Catholic altar where is ceremony, or in a 
Presbyterian Church where is a sermon. It is not 
the silence, it is not the ceremony, it is not the ser- 
mon that draws the Christ, but the congregation. 
What that congregation believes about baptism or 
the apostolic succession or even about the mystery 
of Christ’s own Person, does not alter His love. 
One might compare a church with a hospital, where 
are assembled all sorts and conditions of men and 
women who are drawn together, not by affection 
for one another, not by a common opinion, but by 


24 WHAT IS A CHURCH? 


a common need of, and trust in, a great physician. 
Such a physician does not distinguish between His 
patients—saying to this one that he is too unsound 
of doctrine to be welcome and to that one that he 
has sinned too deeply in his life. No. ‘ Him that 
cometh unto me,” says He, “I will in no wise cast 
out.” ‘The mistake made by Roman Catholics does 
not consist in asserting too strongly the Real Pres- 
ence of Christ in their worship. He vs there 
present. Where the Catholic goes wrong is in 
denying Christ’s presence in other Churches than 
his own. It is not that the Roman Christ is too 
great; He is not as great as the Christ universal. 
Hence, to those who argue over the Christ of 
yesterday and to those who contend earnestly for 
the Christ of tomorrow, I suggest that, first of all, 
they should make sure of the Christ of today. In- 
evitably, the Christ of yesterday recedes into the 
distance of passing time. And over the Christ of 
tomorrow, there are also differences, for the Christ 
of tomorrow has not yet appeared. Over history 
and over prophecy, therefore, we argue and some- 
times go so far as to quarrel, but over worship and 
duty, we are able to agree; for in worship and duty 
we meet no distant Christ who was once, or will be 
sometime, but the Christ Who is, here and now. 
In the New Testament, therefore, the presence of 
Christ dissolved at once all doubts and all distinc- 
tions. Simon Zelotes became more than a religious 
zealot, and Peter, the fisherman, became a fisher of 


WHAT IS A CHURCH? 25 


men. We should therefore avoid these labels— 
modernist, fundamentalist, premillenialist—each of 
which emphasises one, and only one, aspect of 
truth. Doubtless we should be up-to-date. Doubt- 
less our foundations should be sure. And doubtless 
we have a living hope of His return amongst us. 

But Christ is all these things and more than all. 
And in the New Testament, I can find—within the 
Early Church—a mention of only one label—the 
Nicolaitines, who flourished in the congregation of 
Pergamos. St. John tells us that the Nicolaitines 
had a doctrine, and it is, perhaps, strange that no 
one has discovered what that doctrine was. It may 
have been conservative; it may have been liberal; it 
may have been orthodox, it may have been latitu- 
dinarian; but in any event, God hated it. And 
why? Because it was Nicolaitine. It was of 
Nicolas and not of Christ. Whatever of truth 
there was in it and whatever of falsity, it obscured 
the Redeemer. Nicolas? Who was Nicolas? Was 
Nicolas crucified for Pergamos? Even Paul pro- 
tests that he, the Apostle to the Gentiles, was not 
so crucified for Corinth. Here was the majesty of 
the Saviour, thrown, as it were, on the screen by 
the light of God’s Spirit, and suddenly Nicolas 
pokes his head into the field of illumination and 
casts his own black shadow on to the Countenance 
Divine. Nicolas is the eternal symbol of contro- 
versial egotism—the big “I” instead of the Great 
Himself. 


26 WHAT IS A CHURCH? 


It is indeed worth remembering that the follow- 
ers of Christ themselves were not called Christians 
until, years after the Ascension, they reached Anti- 
och. At the Jordan, where Christ was baptised, on 
the Mount where He was transfigured, in the 
Garden where He was tempted, near the Cross 
where He died and before the Tomb where He 
rose from the dead, His friends were content to be 
His “ disciples ’’—people taught by Him—and His 
“apostles ’’—people sent by Him. It was the 
world that insisted on their assuming the name of 
a sect, like the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Ag- 
nostics. And it is the mistake that the world has 
always made. Where Christ says “all ye are 
brethren,” the world replies that some must be rich 
and others poor; some are French and others Ger- 
man; some are black and others white; some are 
sound in faith and others unsound, all of which 
means that the goodwill of Christ is frustrated by 
human frontiers, that will have to be broken down. 


For we make His love too narrow 
By false limits of our own, 

And we magnify His strictness 
With a zeal He will not own. 


In Turkey—to give one instance—it is remark- 
able that while Armenian Christians are massacred 
and Greek Christians deported, American Chris- 
tians are welcomed. And why? Because the 
Greeks and the Armenians fought their battle for 


WHAT IS A CHURCH? 27 


Christ with creeds and with labels and with cere- 
monies—fought it heroically and to the death— 
whereas Americans fought the same battle for 
Christ with colleges and hospitals and schools, let- 
ting their service fall, like the rain from heaven, 
on Moslem and Christian alike. And the result is 
that we are beginning to see a new idea of conver- 
sion to Christ. Our missionaries are less inclined 
than they were to compass sea and land to make 
one proselyte who shall be labelled a Christian, and 
aim rather at offering Christ to the Moslem, as a 
Moslem, to the Buddhist, as a Buddhist, to the 
Jew, as a Jew. Christ did not destroy the religion 
of His own people but fulfilled it. And as He ful- 
filled the Hebrew faith, so does He fulfil all faiths, 
purging them of the wrong and perfecting them in 
the right. The Christian whose background is 
Moses, or Buddha, or Confucius, or Mohammed, 
will not be the same as we whose background was 
Wodin and Thor. 

Then the manner of worship in church makes no 
difference? I do not say so. Everything that is 
different from anything else makes a difference. 
There was once a brilliant architect who designed 
a beautiful church which had but one fault, namely, 
that you could not hear what was said from the 
pulpit. That was doubtless merely a detail, but it 
was an important detail, for a congregation cannot 
receive a Gospel which they do not hear. Simi- 
larly, | entered a church the other day because I 


28 WHAT IS A CHURCH? 


wanted to find a place where I might read a few 
verses from the Bible. It was a beautiful church, 
like the other, and again, it had but one fault, 
namely, that you could not see to read in it. It 
was all that it ought to be, except that it was 
devoid of light. In order to read the Bible, I 
found that I had to keep outside that church. The 
ceremonies, the organisation, the creeds, the music, 
the sacraments, the sermons, the Sunday Schools, 
the religious orders—everything about a church 
—should be subjected to this one test, namely, 
whether thereby the Christ is revealed or obscured. 
That, and that alone, is what matters. In every 
act of worship, of teaching, of social service, the 
aim should be to set forth the Redeemer to those 
who have yet to know Him more perfectly. 

We are too ready to suppose that the cause of 
Christ is to be advanced by the scrutiny of manu- 
scripts and by learned discourses and abstruse 
metaphysics. There are preachers who think that 
when they use the word “ Christocentric,” they 
have said a bigger and newer thing than St. John 
said when he told us of Christ being in our midst. 
Words like Christology and “ Christocentric”’ are 
mere pedantic paraphrases for the splendid sim- 
plicity of a Bible, expressed for the most part in 
vivid Saxon. “ Are you a premillenialist?’? I am 
asked, and I answer, “‘I cannot understand such 
long words. I am merely a one-syllable Chris- 
tian.”’ I remember well that, at the outbreak of 


WHAT IS A CHURCH? 29 


the war, there arose in the British Parliament the 
question what would be the best design for the 
new paper money. And some people suggested a 
design so complicated that nobody would be able 
to forge a counterfeit. Mr. Lloyd George, who 
was Chancellor of the Exchequer, then stated that 
according to the experience of the Bank of Eng- 
land, the simplest signature on a note was the 
hardest to imitate. It is the simple Christ Who 
must be genuine. 

The presence of Christ is thus what makes the 
difference between the Christian Church and either 
the Mosque or the Synagogue. It may be true that 
their windows are open to the plain light of a dis- 
tant Deity, whose truth and justice and power 
shine cold upon the worshippers. The windows of 
a Christian Church are, however, illuminated for- 
ever with the Supreme Figure of the Founder, 
accompanied by His saints, apostles, and martyrs. 
In the morning, as the sun shines into the church, 
the faithful see Him, and are surrounded by a 
great cloud of witnesses. In the evening, as the 
inner light of the Church shines forth into the 
darkness, the world sees Him and that same great 
cloud of witnesses. "The Christ that the Church 
sees and worships, is the Christ that the Church 
shows. If the pattern of the window be unduly 
elaborated, if it be overloaded with ornament, if it 
be crowded with detail, then, the Christ may be 
lost in the design, or His Being may be cramped 


30 WHAT IS A CHURCH? 


into angular and impotent attitudes. To clear 
away whatever complicates His simple love and 
His simple power, is thus the frequently recurring 
task of those who wish to be His witnesses. The 
artist painting a portrait does not study optics. 
He looks earnestly at the face. 


Til 
WHY READ THE BIBLE? 


BOUT the Bible, there is this advantage, 
that whether we go to church or not, we 
can carry it with us everywhere and make 

it our constant companion. If, then, we neglect 
the Bible, the responsibility for so doing is entirely 
our own. That the Bible is so neglected, cannot be 
denied. Most of us are too busy with other mat- 
ters to find time to read the Bible and we are con- 
tent, therefore, with the verses which the minister 
still includes in “the preliminaries,’ as they are 
called, of public worship. What has alienated us 
from the Bible is not an intellectual difficulty over 
its contents but the paramount claim of the auto- 
mobile, the country club, and the making of money 
to pay for these things. 

We are content, therefore, with an easier litera- 
ture and are much relieved in our minds when 
learned or pretentious persons tell us that the Bible 
has ceased to be trustworthy; is full of errors; and 
may now be discarded. That comforting theory 
sets us free for golf on Sunday; and, as we tramp 
around the links, we thoroughly approve of the 
latest scholarship. We need not learn the Bible 


31 


82 WHY READ THE BIBLE? 


any longer for ourselves, and we need not teach 
the Bible any longer to others. It is a most happy 
release from reverence to God and service to man. 
And the sequel for society—for the nation—for 
mankind? One wonders! 

It is possible that, in this mood, we under- 
estimate the Bible. Far be it from me to deal 
hastily with anyone who is troubled with doubts, — 
but life is really too short for time to be wasted on 
what the Psalmist calls “the fool’ who cannot or 
will not admit that the Bible is unique. ‘That the 
Bible stands alone among books, is common ground 
with everybody who is anybody, and it is merely 
in passing, therefore, that one mentions one or two 
illustrative facts. 

A hundred and fifty years ago, there was the 
French Revolution and an outburst of Rationalism. 
Immediately there arose, for the first time, the 
Bible Societies which translated this obsolete vol- 
ume into every language, whether written or un- 
written, on the face of the earth; and momentous 
have been the results. In India and the East, the 
Bible is more read than any other book ever has 
been or ever will be; China alone has absorbed 
ninety million copies. Gandhi, the mystic, and 
Sun- Yat-Sen, the statesman, are both of them read- 
ers of the Bible. In earlier days, there may have 
been a time when, in English-speaking countries, a 
ruler could afford to be ignorant of the Bible, but 
with the progress of enlightenment, the Bible has 


WHY READ THE BIBLE? 33 


become an essential, at any rate, in the English- 
speaking world. All recent Prime Ministers in 
Britain—Gladstone, Rosebery, Salisbury, Balfour, 
Asquith, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, and Baldwin 
have been men of the Bible, and every recent 
American President—McKinley, Taft, Roosevelt, 
Wilson, Harding and Coolidge—has taken good 
care to be acquainted with the volume on which he 
swears his loyalty to the United States. When H. 
G. Wells proposes to compile a new Bible, a popu- 
lar magazine manages to market the idea for pre- 
cisely one month, but during that very month, the 
circulation of the old Bible exceeds that of the 
popular magazine. Then we have Conan Doyle 
suggesting a Bible without the Old Testament, 
which idea also lasts for one month, only to be 
followed by De Mille’s. great film, The Ten Com- 
mandments. And when someone organises a de- 
bate on the Inspiration of the Bible, the newspapers 
report it and the radio broadcasts it as fully as the 
most sensational of international prize fights. 

In every generation, there are similar evidences 
to the ineradicable fascination of the Bible. Schol- 
ars slay the Book but it rises from the dead. And 
from all this it follows that the question to be 
answered on the Bible is essentially the same ques- 
tion that we must answer on Christ. Beyond dis- 
pute, He was the best Man, and beyond dispute, 
this is the best Book. ‘Then was the best Man, and 
is the best Book merely human or also divine? Is 


34 WHY READ THE BIBLE? 


the Bible and is the Christ to be accepted as the 
Word of God? Was the Man God incarnate? 
Was the Book divinely inspired? ‘That, in plain 
terms, is the issue. 

To this question on the Bible, three answers have 
been given. First: there are those who value the 
Bible as a supreme literature, inspired by genius as 
other great literature is inspired ; and that is so far, 
so good. Secondly: there are those who find the 
Bible to be more than other literature, however 
noble it be, and declare that the Bible contains the 
Word of God. And that goes further and is better. 
Thirdly, and my own belief is: that the Bible, con- 
sisting of sixty-six books written during fifteen 
centuries or more, and moulded and selected by the 
inspired piety of fifty generations of worshipful 
people, is now to be trusted, for life here and here- 
after, as wholly and in all its parts, the revelation 
of God to man, of man to himself and of the uni- 
verse to us who dwell within it. It was in that 
belief that they to whom I owe my being lived and 
died, leaving an example of faith and duty which 
I find to be indeed rare, and I have proved that 
belief myself by seeking in vain for any passage in 
the Bible which fails to yield an abundant harvest, 
in mental stimulus, moral encouragement or spirit- 
ual satisfaction, for whatever time and thought I 
may have devoted to it. 

The difficulties in the Bible, as they are called, 
fall under three heads, first : the miracles; secondly : 


WHY READ THE BIBLE? 35 


the mistakes; thirdly: the lapses in ethics. For the 
man ,who regards the Bible merely as literature, 
none of these offer any perplexity because he takes 
the Bible no more seriously than he takes his 
Homer or his Shakespeare. For the man who says 
that the Bible contains the Word of God, the diff- 
culties are, again, simplified because whenever he 
encounters one, he can say that the passage in ques- 
tion is not part of God’s Word to him. If, then, 
you wish to skim the surface of life instead of 
soaring to its heights and peering into its depths, 
you can adopt a theory of the Bible which will 
enable you to enjoy much of the Scripture without 
troubling about the rest. Indeed, it is an abundant 
banquet that this Book provides, and no one, living 
or dead, has yet exhausted that illimitable and 
varied “ bread of life.” Even for him who wishes 
to run as he reads, there is offered a choice of food. 
The fact that somebody announces a mistake in 
ethics in Exodus does not affect the Twenty-third 
Psalm. And the fate of the Gadarene swine need 
not cancel the Sermon on the Mount. The Bible is 
like a tree which grew with the centuries, reaching 
forth its branches to greet God’s sun. Pick the 
fruit, then, which is nearest to hand. And, for the 
moment, do not worry about that which seems to 
be beyond your reach. When you have made that 
part of the Bible which you can understand and 
enjoy your own, then it will be time enough to 
consider the rest. 


36 WHY READ THE BIBLE? 


If, however, I am not myself content with se- 
lected passages from the Bible, the reason is, first 
and foremost, that in this matter, I must give due 
weight to the example of Jesus who accepted His 
Bible as a whole. Our Lord lived in an era when 
the best in Greek and Roman literature was avail- 
able. And yet His perfect character was nourished 
entirely on the Old Testament which was His only 
library. In the prophecies of Isaiah, He heard the 
call to His public career. In the law of Moses, He 
found His defence against the Tempter. In the 
Book of Jonah, and indeed in Jonah’s whale itself, 
He discovered the sign of His resurrection. And 
in the Sermon on the Mount, there is not an idea 
which you may not trace to those ancient Hebrew 
Scriptures. When Our Lord talked with His 
friends, He did not enter into bitter argument over 
the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible. What 
He said was, “ Search the Scriptures.” ‘“‘ Have ye 
never read,’ He would ask, ‘‘ what David did?” 
Did they not remember that in the beginning God 
created them male and female? If only they had 
known what was read to them on the Sabbath day, 
they would have understood the Christ. It was 
not their opinions of the Bible that He condemned 
but their ignorance of its pages. And this is the 
ignorance that confronts us today. 

At the University of Cambridge when I was an 
undergraduate, a number of us met every week to 
read the Bible itself. All forms of faith and of 


WHY READ THE BIBLE? 37 


doubt and of denial, then current, were to be found 
in this little company, but whether we accepted or 
criticised or rejected the Gospel of St. John, we did 
at least know what it contained. We concealed 
neither our dogmas nor our heresies. And an open 
Bible, openly discussed, was thus a part of what 
has been called a liberal education. At Toynbee 
Hall, in East London, I have spent many an 
evening around the fireside, talking over the prob- 
lems of life with men drawn from Eastern Europe 
_and elsewhere, whose knowledge of English was 
imperfect and, in every such discussion, it made all 
the difference that I was able to quote the Bible. 
For twenty years in England, my Sundays were 
devoted to teaching or addressing audiences of 
working men—for the most part, actual trade 
unionists—and, again, what I gave them was 
simply the Bible. Anyone who masters any part 
of the Bible for himself has something of value to 
share with others. 

What Our Lord said to the lawyer was not 
“how does your rabbi or clergyman read the 
Bible?” but “ how readest thou?” He asks us to 
give Him our own first-hand opinion of Scripture 
and not what somebody else has told us to believe. 
Indeed, He bade us “ take heed and beware of the 
leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees.” The 
Pharisees were the fundamentalists of that day 
who wore phylacteries in which every syllable of 
the Scriptures was held to be sacred; who yet con- 


38 WHY READ THE BIBLE? 


fined their attention to such favourite texts, so 
ignoring the social and industrial message of Scrip- 
ture and overlooking that command to love one an- 
other which Paul put before prophecy and even 
before faith and hope. On the other hand, the 
Sadducees were modernists who taught that, ac- 
cording to the latest results of Greek philosophy, 
there was “no resurrection, neither angel, nor 
spirit.” To both these groups Christ declared that, 
by their tradition, they made the law of God to be 
of none effect. In obedience to Christ, therefore, I 
read the Bible with my own eyes, refusing to wear 
either the spectacles or the blinkers offered by 
scholars, critics and popular novelists. 

For consider the fundamentalist attitude. Not 
long ago, I read for myself the Book of Revelation. 
I was amazed by what seemed to me to be its mod- 
ern significance. There was not a verse that I did 
not find in the newspapers. And I wrote a book to 
this effect. A friend told me that I must not ex- 
pect any wide circulation for this volume. “ The 
Premillenialists,”’ said he, ‘‘ will not read it because 
your phrases are not theirs, and others will not read 
it because they are afraid of the controversies of 
the Premillenialists.” In other words, the Chris- 
tian Church leaves the Four Horsemen of the 
Apocalypse to Ibafiez who uses the image for what 
has been the most widely distributed novel and the 
most widely attended motion picture of our time. 
The Pharisees, on the one ‘hand, and the Sadducees, 


WHY READ THE BIBLE? 39 


on the other, have closed a book of vision which 
inspired Dante, the greatest poet of Italy, Milton, 
the greatest poet of England, Isaac Newton, the 
greatest of England’s scientists, and Michael 
Angelo, who was among the greatest of artists. It 
is, indeed, lamentable that in a highly civilised land 
where there is supposed to be the latest improve- 
ment in schools and colleges, generations should 
enter mature life without any appreciation of the 
most radiant symbolism which has ever illuminated 
the genius of our race. 

At school and the university, I studied mathe- 
matics and only mathematics, for seven years. It 
was a narrow and an intensive curriculum which, 
however, did at least impress on the mind what is 
meant by a proof. After that stern discipline, I 
confess that I have been amazed by some at least 
of the flimsy deductions of the more pretentious 
scholarship. Because some German says a thing, 
it is supposed to be so. But there is no mind less 
reliable on such deduction than the German mind. 
I well remember meeting Professor Masaryk, as 
he then was, who is now President of Czecho- 
Slovakia. He advanced the belief that Britain is 
a Protectionist country and I asked him how he 
could have arrived at any such conclusion? His 
answer was that he had made a close study of 
British finance, as set forth by the most authori- 
tative German economists. 

Now here was a man of genuine learning who 


40 WHY READ THE BIBLE? 


had been taught by German professors the precise 
reverse of the plain facts. During the war, what 
was essentially the same dossier of diplomatic docu- 
ments—everyone of them admittedly genuine—was 
examined by theological experts, first in Germany, 
then in Britain. And on those documents, the 
experts delivered diametrically opposite judgments. 
There is a scholarship that adds definitely to ascer- 
tained knowledge. Such scholarship should be wel- 
comed, and there is nothing to be feared from it. 
But when the scholar theorises, he has no more 
authority than the layman who theorises. And as 
a science, the theories of scholarship vary with 
every decade and could not well be less exactly 
ascertained. ‘There is nothing for the layman to 
do but take the Bible afresh, forget the critics and 
the critics of the critics, and read the Book for 
himself. 

The other day, I talked with a Sunday school 
teacher who had perused The Outline of History, 
by H. G. Wells, and—so he explained—had de- 
rived from it one great thought, namely, that Paul 
made it his task to reduce Christ to a system of 
theology. I asked him whether he or Wells had 
seriously read St. Paul’s Epistles? He confessed 
that he had not, and that he could give no guaran- 
tee for Wells. I then told him that the impression 
which I had derived from those Epistles was that 
Paul was anxious to do the exact opposite of what 
he said that Wells suggested; that he set himself 


WHY READ THE BIBLE? 41 


not to bind Christ by dogmas but to liberate Him 
from dogmas; that this was the reason of His con- 
troversies with the Jewish Christians and of the 
more passionate quarrel with the Jews who were 
not Christians; and that for this reason He was 
arrested and ultimately lost his life. I do not ask 
others to agree wtih my view, as thus stated, or to 
disagree with the other view, but it is obvious that 
what I have found in St. Paul is not what my 
friend found in H. G. Wells. 

The Outline of History was widely circulated. 
It was bold and it was interesting, and it shook the 
faith of many. But already there are hints that it 
is far from reliable. I did, however, refresh my 
memory of the few pages which Wells is able to 
spare for what he considers to be that compara- 
tively trifling phenomenon called Christianity. He 
advances the view that our faith was developed 
from the cult of Serapis-Isis-Horus on the Nile, 
and that the redemption of the world originated, 
not on the Cross of Calvary, but in the Temple of 
Karnak. When Isaac Watts wrote his hymn about 
“the fountain filled with blood,’ he was. sub- 
consciously perpetuating the rites of Mithraism. 
About this thesis, thus advanced with an immense 
show of spectacular erudition, what I would say 
is, that everyone knows that between all religions, 
there are certain correspondences. E;veryone is 
influenced by everything, and everything is in- 
fluenced by everything and everybody else. In that 


42 WHY READ THE BIBLE? 


general sense, I am writing these words under the 
subtle telepathy of the Grand Llama of Tibet. 

But when we leave hypotheses behind and come 
down to facts, we find that Paul was not a Greek 
or a Hellene, born or bred at Alexandria, but a Jew 
of the Jews, born at Tarsus and educated at Jerusa- 
lem in the strictest sect of the Pharisees; that so far 
as we have any record, he never visited Egypt at 
all, and that in 0 reported writing or saying of 
his does he once mention Egypt; that after his con- 
version, he retired alone not to Egypt but to 
Arabia; and that while he met Apollos from Alex- 
andria, it was only after his views had been ma- 
tured; and what happened was that he had to 
explain to Apollos, who only knew the Baptism of 
John, the very fulness of Christ’s gospel, including 
the gift of the Holy Spirit, which, apparently, 
Apollos ought to have learned at Karnak. 

When therefore I am offered as “ history ” the 
substitution of Karnak for Calvary or the addition 
of Karnak to Calvary, I take the precaution to 
verify the other man’s quotations. What he tells 
me about the Bible is not a sufficient substitute for 
the Bible itself, 


IV 
IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 


N a previous chapter, I have admitted frankly 
that there are hard places in the Bible. I said 
that these difficulties might be divided into 

three classes, first: the miracles; secondly: the al- 
leged mistakes; thirdly: the alleged lapses from 
ethics and morality. On the miracles, I will say a 
word at a later stage. Here it is enough to remark 
that if they occurred, the Scriptures would not have 
been a witness of truth, had they omitted the facts 
merely because the facts were unusual. The report 
of a miracle is only an error if the miracle did not 
happen. If the miracle did happen, to report it is 
a duty to science as science dawns from day to day. 

As to the “errors’”’ of fact and morals, let us 
realise at the outset that there are two kinds of 
Bible. First, we have sacred volumes like the 
Maxims of Confucius, the Koran and the Book of 
Mormon which were offered to the faithful as they 
stand—every colon exact and unalterable as the 
Constitution of the United States of America. 
These bibles have had great influence, but the 
trouble with them is that we must accept them 
without question or reservation. They do not per- 

43 


A IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 


suade or convince; they command; and the religion 
or life, sustained on such diet, is static. It lacks 
initiative. The reason is suspended and atrophied. 
In the words of St. Paul, “‘ the letter killeth.”’ 

The Jewish Bible was not written, therefore, all 
at once or once for all. In it, we have a nation, 
thinking aloud. And no nation, thus thinking 
aloud, thinks only of God or of good or of truth or 
of right. The very inspiration of the Bible con- 
sists in the ruthless candour with which man is 
there able to hold the mirror of truth to his own 
face. A king and Oriental autocrat like David sins 
with Bathsheba, and in the Bible we can read per- 
haps the only Court Circular, ever issued, which 
states the scandal as it happened, that informs the 
world that the next king, Solomon, is the son of an 
adulteress. If then a society which sustains one 
divorce for every ten marriages turns shy at such 
plain speaking, the reason may not be wholly dis- 
creditable to the Bible. When a poet, carried cap- 
tive into exile, is moved to hatred of his Baby- 
lonian oppressor, no censor stays his imprecatory 
pen as he prays that the babes be dashed against 
the stones. He is the Maeterlinck who refuses to 
assist the German intellectuals, or the Belgian dip- 
lomat who declines to accompany a German into 
the President’s dining room, or the French Prime 
Minister who cannot bring himself to discuss 
reparations. The landscape enervates which is all 
green pastures and still waters. In the Bible, he 


IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? AB 


who has the courage is invited “ o’er moor and fen, 
o’er crag and torrent, till the night is gone.” He 
is confronted by a scenery of wild and impressive 
grandeur. Life is not easy and the Bible would not 
be the Book of Life if it were free from obstacles. 

It is thus the peculiar merit of the Bible that it 
challenges enquiry, it provokes doubt, it disturbs 
a too placid faith, it forces us to face the riddle of 
our existence. We criticise; we question; we re- 
pudiate; but we are gripped. The Bible is like 
some inescapable drama. We cannot explain Ham- 
let but we cannot avoid seeing him. 

It is the Bible, therefore, beyond all other litera- 
tures that has moved the archzologist to unveil the 
past. It is in the holy lands, as they are called, that 
the origins of history have been first uncovered. 
Inspiration is thus two-fold. The Scriptures are 
inspired and the Scriptures also inspire. You can- 
not enter a museum, you cannot walk through a 
gallery of pictures, you cannot collect tapestries or 
admire carvings, you cannot study architecture, 
history, or poetry, and you cannot stroll by moun- 
tain, stream or forest without losing some measure 
of appreciation unless the Bible be the background 
of the brain. 

The Bible is a book, therefore, that demands and 
evokes from the reader the highest intelligence. It 
is intended, not to dispense with the mind but to be 
a gymnastic for the mind. So exacting is the 
standard of common sense required by Scripture 


46 IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 


that in the opinion of the Roman Catholic Church, 
the individual cannot be trusted, of himself, to in- 
terpret the Bible. Among Protestants, the reading 
of the Bible is or ought to be assisted by an humble 
dependence on God’s Holy Spirit. The proud 
man, whose will has never been surrendered to 
what is higher than himself, will stumble and com- 
plain as he treads this hard and upward path. But 
the reverent man, as he climbs, will breathe an in- 
vigorating air and his eye will be satisfied by an 
ever extending prospect. Some of the difficulties 
found in the Bible are the fault of the reader. 

Many of such “hard places” have been long 
familiar to students. But I am writing also for 
laymen to whom these alleged discrepancies are 
offered constantly as arguments against the Bible, 
and a few illustrations may be useful as showing 
how one reader of the Scriptures, at any rate, ap- 
proaches these passages. It is, perhaps, only by 
definite examples that the general argument can be 
made clear. 

We are told that the four Evangelists give four 
versions of what Pilate wrote over the crucified 
Christ, namely : 

Matthew—“ This is Jesus the King of the Jews.” 

Mark—*“ The King of the Jews.” 

Luke—‘* This is the King of the Jews.” 

John—“ Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the 
Jews.” 

Apparently, it is forgotten that the inscription 


IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? A? 


was written in three languages, Hebrew, Greek and 
Latin, which circumstance, in itself, disposes of the 
point raised. But that is not all. The very fact 
that the inscription is thus quoted with slight and 
immaterial variation is enough to indicate to any 
judge in acourt of law that there were four 
witnesses of the crucifixion who reported inde- 
pendently and without collusion, and not only one 
witness. And this means that there was a four- 
fold witness of the resurrection. It is thus unsafe 
to assume that an apparent discrepancy weakens 
the evidences of Scripture. It may multiply its 
reliability many times. 

similarly, with the varying accounts of St. 
Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Here 
also was an event involving the deepest and most 
sudden emotions. And Paul described it under 
conditions of severe oratorical stress. The fact 
that he and his friends told what they saw and 
what they heard, without premeditation and con- 
spiracy to deceive, would be far more convincing 
to a lawyer trained in the validity of evidence than 
a cooked up story in which, as Lord Melbourne 
said to his cabinet, the rule was, “ Gentlemen, it 
does not matter what we say, provided that we all 
say the same thing.” One account states that the 
bystanders heard the voice. Another account states 
that they “ heard not the voice that spake.’ It is a 
fair assumption that the bystanders heard the voice 
but could not distinguish the words, And a single 


48 IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 


question from a cross-examining attorney would 
have elicited, probably, that solution from the 
witnesses. 

Take another case. In II Samuel vi: 23, we are 
told that “ Michal, the daughter of Saul, had no 
child unto the day of her death”; whereas, in II 
Samuel xxi: 8, we read that Michal, the daughter 
of Saul, had five sons. An “error” and a most 
instructive error. How is it explained? In the 
second passage, a certain Adriel is mentioned as 
the father of those five sons. Now Adriel was 
husband, not of Michal, but of her sister, Merab. 
And it is plain that in this case the pen of a copyist 
slipped, from which apparent mishap we learn this 
astonishing fact that the Bible is the only book in 
which a remote and trifling error by some weary 
scribe of thousands of years ago assumes an im- 
portance that in the twentieth century, requires its 
public discussion in the greatest and richest city 
ever built, a discussion broadcast for millions by 
radio—printed for millions in the secular press— 
and calculated to mark an epoch in the spiritual 
evolution of the race. 

If you had sought an argument for literal in- 
spiration, you could not have found one more pow- 
erful and dramatic. For here we see the eternal 
significance of what our Lord called each jot and 
each tittle. And what has been the result of such 
“errors’’? They have drawn the finest brains to 
the task of textual compilation of the Bible and 


— a 


IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 49 


today there is no book, ancient or modern, in which 
the original versions have been examined with a 
care approaching that which has been devoted to 
the Scriptures. In the present instance, we can 
almost certainly restore the original and true script 
by correcting “ Michal ” to ‘“ Merab.”’ 

Another “mistake” in the Bible is only men- 
tioned here because it has been seriously insisted 
upon by “scholars.”” We are told that in Genesis 
a serpent is said to eat dust whereas serpents don’t 
eat dust! As a matter of fact, there is a much 
worse “‘ mistake”’ than that, for Isaiah talks about 
kings and queens licking the dust, which is not a 
habit of queens and kings. Indeed, few of us re- 
porters describe a prize fight without saying that 
one or other combatant bites the dust. And this 
again is not a custom of prize fighters. 

There is not a literature, anywhere, that does not 
employ metaphor, and the metaphors of the Bible 
are supreme. This of the serpent eating dust is 
one of them. It means that evil feeds on that 
which dies—the passions, the lies, the lusts, which 
are carnal—the dust and not the soul. 

That the Jews exceeded their contemporaries in 
an accurate observation and love of nature, is ad- 
mitted by all whose opinion counts. The Bible has 
been the inspiration of Natural History and only 
in lands where it is read, have we great collections 
of such objects and animals. But it is, none the 
less, objected that in Leviticus xi:6, the hare is 


50 IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 


said to chew the cud, whereas the hare does not 
chew the cud but only makes motions with his lips 
that might indicate this habit. Here, again, is a 
perplexity that instructs. The Jews decided to live 
on a selected diet. And there is not a doctor, 
today, who will deny that they were right. Leav- 
ing Egypt, they saw the hare. It seemed to fall 
into the class of unclean animals. And they took 
no risks. In the words of St. Paul, they “ ab- 
stained from all appearance of evil.” They were 
careful to err, if at all, on the right side—an 
example not wholly without value in days when 
Prohibition is under enforcement. 

So with the statement in Leviticus that grass- 
hoppers, crickets and locusts have four feet. If 
anyone seriously believes that the writer did not 
know of insects having six feet, he is entitled to 
that impression. The point of the passage is obvi- 
ously that these insects were to be distinguished 
from birds which “go” on two feet! No one 
reading the verses could be under any doubt as to 
what flying things he might or might not eat. 

So much has been said of Scriptural inaccuracy 
and the impossibility of an exact inspiration that, 
at the risk of wearying myself and the reader, I 
will add one or two other illustrations of “ errors ” 
in the Bible on which critics—even scholarly crit- 
ics—rely. 

In Romans ii: 11, we are told that “‘ there is no 
respect of persons with God.” But in Romans 


IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 51 


ix: 13, we read “ Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’ 
And this is held to be proof that St. Paul was not 
in the Spirit when he wrote his Epistle. ‘The 
answer here is, of course, that a judge on the bench 
should have no respect of persons, but that he 
should certainly distinguish between an innocent 
man anda guilty man. If God had less respect for 
Esau than He had for Jacob, it is because Jacob 
had more respect than Esau for God. 

Another is this: In Genesis xxii: 1, we are told 
that God did tempt Abraham. But in James 1: 13, 
we read that God tempts nobody. The answer is 
here, again, to be found in the experience of every 
day. <A father takes his son into business. He 
sends him traveling as an agent and so “ tries him 
out.” But he does not introduce him into haunts 
of vice to tempt him. God put the good in 
Abraham to the test. He did not encourage the 
evil in him. And it is an excellent lesson for all 
fathers. 

Then we have the statement in Exodus that God 
hardened Pharoah’s heart, which was, it is argued, 
a wrong thing for a God of love to do. If God 
did not harden Pharoah’s heart, who did? ‘That 
is the question, and no man yet has answered it. 
What is the origin of evil? We find the serpent 
in Eden, but where did the serpent come from? 
We have here, not a Biblical error, but the pro- 
foundest mystery of our existence. Job discussed 
it. It has been discussed by millions. And if you 


52 IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 


cut out the texts in Exodus, you would not be 
solving the puzzle, but only running away from it. 
Pharoah had an imperious will. He refused to 
surrender that will to God. And inevitably his 
heart was hardened. Science calls it cause and 
effect. Islam calls it Kismet. E;xodus calls it God. 
And the higher critic is content to call it a mistake 
in the Old Testament. ‘That is, apparently, the sum 
total of education that many modern scholars 
derive from one of the immortal phrases in the 
literature of our race. 

Finally: let us look at the oft-challenged verses ; 
Exodus xxii: 18, God said, Thou shalt not suffer 
a witch to live; and Deuteronomy xxi: 18-21, in 
which the parents of a son who is “ stubborn and 
rebellious,” “a glutton and a drunkard” may have 
him stoned to death. Now let us be quite blunt 
over this matter. Is witchcraft defended? Is dis- 
respect of children for parents condoned? Is the 
definite offence of gluttony or extravagance and of 
intemperance to be treated lightly? These are 
devastating sins. Everywhere, in those days, there 
was capital punishment for sins, trivial compared 
with these. Death was then the common penalty; 
today, we substitute dismissal and economic ruin. 
Let a railwayman drink and what mercy will be 
shown him? Let a bank-clerk overspend his sal- 
ary, and where will he be at the end of the month? 
To those who wrote the Bible, sin was death, be- 
cause sin, they believed, slays the soul. And, given 


IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 58 


such sin, Our Lord Himself told us that the body 
did not very much matter. 

The persecution of witches in England and at 
Salem, Massachusetts, was deplorable because the 
victims were innocent. They were not guilty of 
the crime alleged. But [ am one who has seen 
what the witch doctor means for Africa. His san- 
guinary incantations are a fearful tyranny. And 
Il am by no means certain that a humane adminis- 
trator would not be justified in making a final 
example of such a terror incarnate. The Bible is 
not a gift only to Americans in the twentieth cen- 
tury. It is a gift to all races in all stages of social 
evolution. To Americans, the thing to prohibit is 
liquor. To the Jew, what tempted people to idol- 
atry was a graven image, or picture, and it was 
such art that was prohibited. The principle is the 
same—‘if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” 
Or, in a sentence, any sacrifice is worth a victory 
over evil. 

But it is the very purpose of the Bible to offer 
an alternative to the extreme penalties of the law. 
Nowhere is the terror of the Mosaic law described 
in more graphic terms than in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews with its references to “a certain fearful 
looking for of judgment and fiery indignation 
which shall devour the adversaries.” We are there 
told that “he that despised Moses died without 
mercy under two or three witnesses.” Just so; 
what the critic considers to be a harsh code of 


54 IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 


criminal jurisprudence is here—nearly two thou- 
sand years before his modernism—declared to be 
such. He did not know it but he was emphasising 
the very essence of what has been condemned by 
his school as Pauline theology. The law was, as 
St. Paul put it, a schoolmaster to bring us to 
Christ. What He did by dying was, somehow or 
other, to remove that curse of the law. We do not 
now need to slay sinners. He saves them. And 
the very dread of the law which is urged against 
the Bible proves to be the prelude of that grace— 
that healing of the diseased morality we call 
salvation. 

The hard places in the Bible are thus never 
devoid of stimulus. Life is a problem to be 
solved, and so is the Book of Life. If that Book 
were wholly simple, it would be untrue. 

And if it failed to bear the authentic marks of 
antiquity, the Book would have to be suspected 
as a record of the spiritual, moral, material and in- 
tellectual struggles with which it deals. There was 
a period when the production of stained glass was 
a lost art; and why? The manufacturers thought 
that beauty would be attained by eliminating every 
imperfection from the substance of their windows. 
And they thus gave the world what was obviously 
modern and devoid of charm. Their windows 
were perfect but uninspired. It was then discov- 
ered that the loveliness and value in the earlier 
glass was due to the retention of sand and other 


eee 


IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 55 


extraneous substances which arrected and dispersed 
and humanised the light of day. Those windows 
were inspired by imperfection. And it is the same 
with the Bible. ‘he other day, I asked myself 
what on earth of help I could derive from the 
measurements of Solomon’s temple? And_ sud- 
denly I remembered that my son is an architect, 
whose profession is thus, as it were, claimed 
by God. 

On the genealogies of the Bible and the lists of 
David’s mighty men, and the role of the priests 
and singers in Chronicles, I would dearly love to 
write at length; and some day, I may do so; 
enough to state here that during these contro- 
versies, I have deliberately tested these passages 
and found them worth while. You visit some 
ancient cathedral like Salisbury. And you say to 
yourself that there is something here which is of 
the spirit, spiritual. You cannot define it. But 
exact measurement shows you that the whole 
cathedral consists of what may be called minor 
mistakes. The windows are not quite uniform. 
The arches are slightly at variance. And the 
result is a living temple, everywhere bearing the 
stamp of a man’s hand and of that divine brain 
with which man is endowed. 

So with the Bible. They who would restore that 
ancient edifice by smoothing away the signs of age 
and applying to the structure the foot-rule of ma- 
terialism, are guilty of the blunder which Ruskin 


56 IS THE BIBLE INSPIRED? 


denounced when so many immortal buildings in 
England were “ scraped” of their exquisite weath- 
ering and turned out spick and span, with not a 
fungus on them. Such modernism is not of science 
nor of the God who adds one ring of record for 
every season endured by the oak of the forest and 
adorns with His tapestry the humblest cottage that 
braves the rain and the tempest, sheltering a life 
within. His thoughts are not our thoughts and it 
is in earthen vessels that He offers us His treasures. 


V 
DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 


F I believe in miracles, it is not because I go 

to Church and read the Bible or “ was brought 

up that way,” but because, at the university, I 

was trained on exact mathematics and cannot now 

escape the conclusion that twice two are neither 
more nor less than four. 

I begin by asking how the world began? And 
to this question, I can find no answer but—God. 
I ask myself, next, how this world will end? and 
again I can find no answer but God. Thirdly, I 
look into the fathomless blue of the sky which 
science tells me is due to illimitable distance and I 
ask whereunto does this universe extend? And 
again the only answer that I can discover is 
God. An illimitable time and an illimitable dis- 
tance lead me to an infinite Being. I admit 
that there is an alternative, namely, Atheism or 
a denial of God. But, for myself, I cannot 
suppose that beyond Everything, there is only 
Nothing. 

When I meet a friend, I study his character. 
And such study is the basis of biography and por- 
traiture. Is it possible for me, then, to discover 


57 


58 DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 


what is the nature of God? I think it is. And 
here is the argument: 

In my hand, I hold a pencil. There is a force 
called gravity which will draw this pencil to the 
table if I let go of it. That force is calculable, 
precise and certain, and yet, in fact, this pencil 
does not drop. Indeed, its motion cannot be pre- 
dicted by any living soul for no one can tell what 
is the word which this pencil will write next. 

The question is whether, as I write these words, 
I have a will of my own or not. Most people will 
say that I have; but there are some scientists who 
say that I haven’t. The other day, I met a dis- 
tinguished astronomer. In the most lucid language 
he told me that everything in the universe is sub- 
ject to law, and only to law. Not only inanimate 
bodies like my pencil but men, animals and insects 
are subject to irresistible instincts which create 
impulses within them that are predetermined as 
fate. If we sin, it is not our fault. If we do well, 
it is no virtue. Moral responsibility, art, poetry, 
religion, love and joy are all a molecular illusion; 
and pain, laughter, sorrow and comfort, all the 
emotions of repentance, of romance and happiness, 
are merely atomic reactions. When I asked my 
friend if he thus explained his own charming smile 
and subtle humor, he replied that these also arose 
from natural causes—from a kind of biological 
calculus. He was entirely serious. For him, 
Astronomy had turned the universe, and his own 


DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 59 


soul, into one vast automaton. On predestination, 
he was more Calvinistic than Calvin; on fatalism, 
he was more fatalistic than the Turk. 

I am not prepared thus to ignore phenomena like 
art, romance, or this moving pencil as it writes. I 
believe that I have a will, that my will, within limits 
can over-rule a natural law like gravity and that if 
I have such a will, so has God. And if God be an 
infinite Being, His will for the universe must be, at 
least, as potent as my will is for this pencil. And 
as this pencil cannot fall to the ground without my 
consent, so—to quote Our Lord—cannot a sparrow 
fall to the ground without Our Father’s knowledge 
and consent. 

A miracle is God’s will over-ruling God’s law. 


And if God’s will cannot over-rule God’s law, we ~ 


must abolish not only miracle but prayer. What is 
the use of praying, “Give us this day our daily 
bread,’ if our daily bread is determined by eco- 
nomic, botanic and climatic laws over which the 
God Who framed them has no control? In an 
answer to prayer, there is as much of a miracle as 
there is in the sun standing still for Joshua or in 
the axe-head floating for Elisha. Between the one 
and the other, there is scientifically no difference 
whatever. And my friend, the astronomer, was 
right when he argued that if God has no will 
apart from law, man has no will apart from law, 
and that everything is material which we have held 
to be spiritual. Unless there be miracle, or an in- 


60 DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 


terference with natural law, God’s will is in abey- 
ance. And it follows, therefore, that if man Him- 
self, and therefore God, is a responsible being, 
miracles not only may have occurred, but must 
occur at all times. The logic is as absolute and 
inescapable as the theorems of Euclid. And at the 
very moment when miracles are challenged, it is 
remarkable that the common people are thinking, 
as never before, of healing by faith, of spiritual- 
ism, of psycho-analysis, of telepathy, of auto- 
suggestion, of any and every pseudo-scientific 
synonym for what the Bible calls the power of 
God. From the devil-dancer in Africa to Dr. 
Coué in France and Christian Science in Boston, 
the authority of mind over matter is declared. 

With this pencil, I write words. And if, in 
holding the pencil, I over-rule the law of gravity, 
it is because I have a thought to express. You see 
an aeroplane in the sky. It is subject to natural 
law. But within the aeroplane there is a human 
will. And in the sky, therefore, a trail of smoke 
traces letters which all who look upward can read. 
It is thus that God guides the universe. In events, 
we can trace His name and His name—so I shall 
now submit—is love. ‘The miracles demonstrate 
that God’s will is good will. 

It is not to be supposed that all recorded miracles 
happened. I do not myself believe that the house 
where Joseph and Mary lived at Nazareth was car- 
ried through the air and deposited in an Italian 


DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 61 


city called Loretto. But of the miracles recorded 
in the Bible, it can be said in every instance that I 
have studied that they have foreshadowed a benefi- 
cent science. Let us consider one or two examples. 

“ Sun,” cried Joshua, “stand thou still upon 
Gibeon and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.” 
What. was the issue thus challenged? Not Ein- 
stein’s theory that time and space and color are all 
relative. It goes deeper than that. What Joshua 
challenged was the tyranny of time. Is the clock 
to be supreme or the clockmaker? Are we to wor- 
ship the solar system or the Creator of the solar 
system? Is there law over sovereignty or sover- 
eignty over law? In days: when men worshipped 
the sun and moon, as some modernists would have 
us again do, Joshua declared that sun and moon 
are subject to the paramount claims of the soul. 
Nor, in man’s whole career, has there been any- 
thing more remarkable than his attempt to obtain 
a victory over time. Not only does he now travel 
at a rate that lengthens his day’s journey a hun- 
dred times, but he manufactures, at a rate which 
turns a year into a day, and he can talk at distances 
with an instantaneous speed, millions of times 
greater than that of the fastest runner ever 
employed by Joshua. Who were the men that 
achieved these wonders? ‘The Chinese? ‘The 
Hindus? No—they were the men who read the 
Book of Joshua and were stimulated by its asser- 
tion of man’s infinite dignity. According to their 


62 DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 


faith was it unto them. And they are even now 
preparing that civilisation, here or hereafter, of 
which it could be foretold that “time shall be 
no more.” 

An axe-head fell into the Jordan and, at the word 
of Elisha, “the iron did swim.” Again, we say, 
impossible! Yet, again, how true as forecast. All 
over the world, iron does swim. ‘Though wood 
floats and iron sinks, not a wooden vessel can be 
sailed at a profit. Who were the men who made 
iron to swim? Everyone of those men had in his 
subconscious mind a knowledge of the Bible, in 
which Book constantly was there developed the 
idea of man mastering water. It is the Book where 
one reads how the Israelites crossed the Red Sea 
dryshod, how Elijah crossed the Jordan, and how 
Our Lord walked on the Sea of Galilee. And the 
day was to come, indeed has nearly come, when we 
can say, ‘“ There is no more sea.” 

Again, chariots of fire! Have they not swept 
across the Atlantic? ‘To Elisha, the conquest of 
the air was a miracle; but to one at least of the 
ancient prophets, it was a triumph of machinery. 
Once I asked a leading minister what he made of 
the first chapter of Ezekiel and he said, “‘a sand- 
storm in the desert!” It was, I felt, an arid 
exegesis. Ezekiel was a poet who observed certain 
simple mechanics. He saw the water-wheel, the 
spinning wheel, the chariot wheel, the potter’s 
wheel; and, for his genius, that was enough. From 


DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 63 


these elementary materials, he built up the first 
vision of an aeroplane—that is, of winged wheels 
that would fly, heavier than air, and would be 
driven by harnessed lightning. And he had the 
wisdom also to foresee that, wonderful as would 
be this triumph of the inventor, a man’s face would 
be seen within its wings and a man’s hand would 
guide its movements. Once more—the issue was 
the dignity of our race, flying like Icarus in the 
face of the sun. That chapter is a miracle of 
prophetic literature. Open the Bible and you will 
have that miracle before your eyes. 

What was the effect of all this on nations that 
wrote and read the Bible? It shattered the idea 
that the sun and moon and stars are deities. It 
destroyed all superstitions associated with wood 
and stone. Man handled natural objects instead of 
dreading them. And where these miracles were 
known, civilisation took courage and advanced. 
First, the slogan, then, the science. 

Perhaps, the biggest thing taught in the law of 
Moses was the duty of health. But in dealing with 
health, law was found to be not enough. The test 
case was leprosy. After his ablutions—the wash- 
ing of cups and plates and hands and feet—a man 
might be smitten with this plague and what re- 
‘mamed? Simply a dreadful segregation. Any 
cure would be a mere accident of good fortune. 
With this fatalistic view of disease, the Hebrews 
were not satisfied. Having witnessed the plagues 


64 DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 


of Egypt, their first idea, when they emigrated 
from that country, was that God would heal them. 
So impregnated were their minds with this faith 
that when a Jewish maid was taken captive and set 
to serve the wife of Naaman, the captain of the 
hosts of Syria, who was a leper, her one regret 
was that this great man could not visit Elisha and 
be cleansed. Now, on a priori grounds, surely, you 
would have thought that the countries which have 
lepers, would be the countries to discover a cure for 
the leper. It is not so. If leprosy is being treated 
with increasing success, the credit is due entirely to 
the men and women who, but for the Bible, would 
have had no interest in and little knowledge of 
their evil. The miracle has inspired the remedy. 
When Our Lord began His public life, He was 
faced, at once, by precisely the same situation as 
that with which Naaman’s maidservant dealt so 
firmly. Jesus preached. But preaching was not 
enough. Into the very synagogue, the sick pursued 
him. Ejither He had to be master of the human 
body or He would be master of nothing. His own 
logic was unanswerable. “If I cannot cure pa- 
ralysis ’’—that, in effect, was what He said—“ it is 
certain that I cannot forgive sin.” And in order to 
prove that He could forgive sin, He said to the sick 
of the palsy, “ Rise up and walk.” In the language 
of war, Our Lord stormed the trenches of disease, 
incidentally challenging prejudices which cost Him 
His life. And there is not a disease today to which 


DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 65 


His Spirit is not a challenge. Fevers, tuberculosis, 
diabetes, one by one, the dread scourges of man- 
kind are surrendering to treatment. 

Did the dead rise? Once more, neither you nor 
I were there to see. But we are living, here and 
now, in this twentieth century and.can see for our- 
selves the result of His action. “ Raising the 
dead ’’—Lazarus, for instance—was not, of course, 
granting immortality. It was merely prolonging 
iientoOv iis natiiral teri Li Lhe) case On, the 
daughter of Jairus, of the widow’s son at Nain 
and of Lazarus himself, death had claimed the 
comparatively young in their prime. The decease 
that was countermanded, as it were, was a prema- 
ture decease. And is not this, once more, precisely 
what is happéning today? In no country is there 
a greater volume of Christian belief than there is 
in the United States. And the statistics tell us that 
the life of the people has been prolonged on the 
average, by twenty years. No wonder that it was 
Luke, a doctor, who narrated most of these mir- 
acles of healing. So far from discouraging natural 
remedies, he is, of ten thousand hospitals today, 
the patron saint. 

Our Lord employed whatever natural remedies 
were available. He told a blind man to bathe his 
eyes. When the daughter of Jairus was raised, 
He advised the family to give her something to 
eat. The man with the palsy had to be brought by 
four men, carrying him on a bed; he had to be 


66 DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 


lifted to the roof of a house; the roof had to be 
broken up and the man had to be let down by 
ropes. The miracle was never used to save trouble 
to lazy people. It was not a substitute for service 
but an illumination of service by power. And so 
with the practice of the Early Church, as laid down 
by James, Our Lord’s brother. ‘That practice was 
to be in exact line with modern science, a fact 
which was more astonishing because those were 
days when, outside the Christian Society, insanity 
and disease were widely misunderstood. “In a 
case of illness,” said St. James, “ you must do two 
things—pray over the patient and anoint him with 
oil.” There must be the spiritual influence; there 
must be the application of natural remedies, not 
one method without the other, but both. The 
object was to show that, in life and in death, God 
and man are not enemies or strangers, but partners 
and fellow-workers, for the good of all. 

“Opening the eyes of the blind.” It was a mir- 
acle once; but it is science now. We have the tele- 
scope, by which at last we see far; the microscope, 
by which we at last see near; and the X-Rays, 
by which at last we see through. “ Making the 
deaf to hear ’—it was again a miracle once; but, 
again, it is science now. We have the telephone, 
the radio, the stethoscope, the seismograph—all 
of them acting as ears for the deaf. Instead of 
famine, we see miracles of feeding; instead of 
drought, miracles of irrigation; and the widow’s 


DID MIRACLES OCCUR? 67 


cruise of oil is not exhausted. The natural re- 
sources of this speck of planetary dust, oil in- 
cluded, are found to be many times more than 
sufficient for the entire human race, even as it has 
multiplied in numbers. 

There are miracles that have yet to be fulfilled. 
When prison doors opened to Peter and Paul, 
something happened which changed man’s concep- 
tion of criminology. When Christ rose from the 
dead, something happened that has been a chal- 
lenge to the cross, the gibbet, the axe, the gallows, 
the electric chair. Everyone, today, knows in his 
heart that our penal systems are doomed, that re- 
generation and not punishment must become the 
aim of the law, and that the crime of man against 
society is but an element in the larger crime of 
society against the Father of us all. Whether the 
fetters fell in the past, is a question on which 
good men differ, but good men are agreed that, 
in the future, fetters must fall and prison gates 
be unbarred. 

_ When therefore I read about miracles, I am not 
only concerned with their occurrence in the past; I 
consider also their message of hope for the present 
and the future. And if I accept the miracles, it is 
not in an emotion or because of a tradition. I 
cannot resist the larger truth to which the irresist- 
ible logic of science leads me. And I am unable, 
therefore, to subscribe to the narrow dogmas of a 
negative rationalism. 


VI 
HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 


BOUT the birth of Jesus, however we may 
regard it, there has always been a tender 
and an exquisite mystery. We have here a 
true test of every true romance; a girl of utter 
innocence accused of ill and vindicated by angels 
and archangels and all the company of Heaven. 
To the deep sentiments of tradition, happily in- 
eradicable from the Christian Church and spread- 
ing every year beyond the borders of that fold, I 
am ready myself to add a strict accountancy to 
whatever may be fairly claimed for truth by 
science. And I will begin with the angels and 
archangels. Why should they be denied? Astron- 
omy teaches us what indeed prophet and psalmist 
long ago declared, that the stars are only to be 
numbered by God Himself; and yet we, living on 
one planet of one solar system, have the audacity 
to assume that nowhere else, either in the universe 
or beyond it, are there living beings, fulfilling as 
angéls or resisting as devils the will of God. And 
such an attitude of mind, narrow, negative and in 
the truest sense superstitious, is described as liberal, 
modern and scientific. 


68 


HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 69 


If this little world of ours teems with men and 
women, birds, beasts, reptiles, insects, and mi- 
crobes; with flowers, trees, and fungi, grass, 
anemones, and the fish of the sea, it is at least 
likely and to me certain that the Bible, correctly 
expressing the universal instinct of mankind, has 
been wisely inspired in revealing to us those other 
beings than ourselves, in other states of existence, 
in which Our Lord believed as firmly as He hbe- 
lieved in the existence of the twelve Apostles. And 
if there be such angels and devils, I can imagine no 
occasion more likely to disclose their existence than 
the birth of a man as Son of God. The denial of 
angels and devils on the part of science is not 
progress; it is pedantry. It is not only in religion 
that the letter killeth. This is true also of physics, 
of mathematics, of anthropology. 

There is, too, another thing that the negativist in 
religion, science and history has to remember. By 
all means, let us have science, but our science, how- 
ever exact, is none the less science if it be attuned 
to chivalry; and even the scientist, when he ap- 
proaches the home in Nazareth, must not forget 
that he was meant to be a gentleman. ‘The honor 
of Mary, Mother of Jesus, is a priceless possession 
of her sex and of our race. It was the glory of her 
innocence—nay, of her vindication against slander 
and suspicion—which inspired and hallowed the 
otherwise gross art and poetry and manners of 
those middle ages whence emerged our modern 


70 HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 


civilisation. Approaching her presence, we must 
put off the shoes from our feet for that ground is 
holy ground. The reverence for her who was de- 
clared to be blessed above all women is the measure 
of the reverence paid to her sisters, the wide world 
over. It was this reverence that reared the 
Cathedral of Rheims. The nation that bombarded 
the Cathedral of Rheims was the nation that pre- 
ferred the negatives of negativism to the knowl- 
edge of faith. If I have to make a choice, I would 
rather be wrong with the men who build than right 
with the men who bombard; I would rather be 
wrong with the men who made Europe a home 
than right with the men who made Europe a hell. 
Happily, there need be no such choice. If Jesus 
be deity, the difficulty is then, not to believe the 
story of Christmas, but to imagine how it could 
have been otherwise. 

With those who see in Jesus a good man who 
lived and died two thousand years ago, I do not 
argue over His birth. These people have rejected 
not the story of Christmas only but all the dis- 
tinctive features of those biographies which we 
call the gospels. To their own master, they stand 
or fall. Indeed, it is better for a man faithfully to 
honor Christ as man than for him to call Him 
God, and then, like Judas, betray Him with the 
kiss of orthodoxy. But the denial of the divinity 
of Jesus is no new thing. It was manifest in 
Galilee when Jesus lived there and labored. “Is 


HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 71 


not this the carpenter’s son?” they asked, “Is not 
His mother called Mary? And His brethren, 
James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas, are they 
not with us? Whence then hath this man these 
things?” In every age, then, there have been those 
who could see in Jesus either a man only or only a 
myth. If He be mere man, then, like other men, 
He would have an earthly father. If He be mere 
myth, He need not be born at all. But we must not 
overlook the fact, as recorded of those who chal- 
lenged His paternity, that, “He did not many 
mighty works there because of their unbelief.” 
They were “offended in Him,” and with reason. 
As son of Joseph, He was claiming more than any 
son of any Joseph had ever claimed. Taking 
broadly the achievements of the Church, the volume 
of which is greater than some critics have discov- 
ered, you will find that the conquest over sin, 
over pain, over idolatry, over ignorance, over pas- 
sion, has been won in the main through faith, not 
doubt. And it was Christ who said that according 
to our faith, not our doubt, would it be unto us. 
He was wisdom and He knew. 

But what, I confess, does much puzzle me is the 
attitude of the man who, while refusing to sub- 
scribe to a belief in the Virgin Birth, says with 
emphasis that to him Jesus of Nazareth is God; 
that He walked on the water; healed the sick; 
cleansed the lepers; was transfigured; died; rose 
again; ascended into heaven; and returns to us by 


72 HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 


the Holy Spirit to be born again in our hearts; 
who, I say, believes all this, and yet protests that 
the Lord Jesus Christ, thus very God of very God, 
must have been born “even as you or I.” All the 
ninety and nine glories of the Christ are freely 
conceded. But the hundredth is denied. His per- 
son is unique, His life is unique, His teaching is 
unique, His power is unique, His death is unique, 
His love is unique, but His birth is the average. 
To every man on this planet and to every beast and 
to every insect and to every fish, science applies the 
hereditary principle; in Christ alone, heredity does 
not matter. He is the one king who need not be 
royal. He is the one son on whom the sins of the 
fathers do not descend. In this view of Christ, 
there is surely an aberration of logic. Once 
admit that He is Deity and, in the accurate sense 
of that word, it would have been extraordinary, 
even incredible, if He had come to us by an 
ordinary birth. 

Not only among the Jews but all over the world, 
people have yearned for a God who would dwell 
among them. What Paul described as “ the earn- 
est expectation of the creature” for “God with 
man’’ is to be found in the poetry of Greece and 
Rome, in Norse legend, Egyptian worship and In- 
dian mysticism. Away in the dim ages of early 
Genesis, we read of the sons of God visiting the 
daughters of men. And centuries before the birth 
of Christ, Isaiah sang that “unto us a son is 


HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 73 


given,’ whose name included “the mighty God.” 
Christ has been, therefore, the one adequate ful- 
filment of a hope which, however degraded in some 
of its manifestations, was universal. Shatter His 
person, and we are left “ having no hope and with- 
out God in the world.” His coming was not con- 
trary to our aspiring instincts as a race. It was 
the supreme expression of those instincts. 

And with every discovery of science, we need 
Him the more. For what is this world wherein we 
must live our lives? It is no longer a cosy little 
cottage where all is familiar. The walls of our 
home are thrown down and we find ourselves cling- 
ing to a speck of planetary dust that floats in illimi- 
table space. Lonely as a cloud, we wander, lost in 
distances, lost in aeons of time, lost in myriads of 
organisms. WhenT consider thy heavens, the work 
of thy fingers, the moon and stars; what 1s man 
that thou art mindful of him and the son of man 
that thou visitest him? If God do not visit us, let 
us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Otherwise, 
we must go mad. In science without faith, there 
is a sure prospect of increased insanity. Emman- 
uel, “God with us,” is the one guardian of our 
common-sense. 

The statement in St. John’s Gospel is that “ In 
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was 
with God, and the Word was God, and the Word 

.. was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.” 
Translated into Latin, that was “the Incarna- 


74 HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 


tion”; and for the sake of discussion, we may 
consider the various ways in which it might have 
happened. 

First, a God-Man might have appeared, full- 
grown, educated, complete. That was how the 
Greek gods came and went, without birth or death, 
and you have similar appearances of Buddha. In- 
deed, after His resurrection, Christ thus came to 
His disciples in the upper room, utter God and 
utter man, but this was only after He had been m 
all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. If 
Hé had avoided birth we could never have found in 
Him a guide to the life that, here and now, we have 
to live. Mothers would not have seen the Christ 
in their children. And children would not have 
discovered the Christ “playing in the market 
place.” Fathers, too, would have missed the sym- 
pathy of Joseph who knew what it was to be bread- 
winner for a household which included the Christ. 
Hence, it is, as it were, inevitable that the Christ 
had to be born. 

With God, as the angel Gabriel said to Mary, 
nothing is impossible. If Jesus had been, like 
James and Jude and Joses, a son of Joseph, the 
Almighty could, at any time, have entered His 
being and made Him incarnate. For instance, it 
might be possible to argue that Jesus was mere man 
before His baptism, and became God when the 
Spirit there descended on Him. But while that 
theory would get rid, perhaps, of the story of 


HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 15 


Christmas, it would not get rid of the miracle in 
His incarnation. It would merely substitute a 
miracle of baptism for a miracle of birth. And the 
later miracle would be the less convincing. It may 
be hard to imagine a man born as God. But it is 
much harder to imagine a man, born and reared 
only as man, yet suddenly becoming God. The 
baptism of John was no more than a local ordi- 
nance and few, comparatively only a small number 
of the human race, have been thus baptised. But 
all of us have to be born, and birth is thus not a 
ceremony, dependent on choice, but a necessity of 
nature. Indeed, the very word nature is birth. 
And the simple, the obvious moment for God to 
visit man was when God’s Son was conceived. 
Joseph was doubtless a good man. According 
to the Gospels, he adopted the child Jesus and 
brought Him up. To the royal pedigree of Joseph, 
Jesus therefore became legally entitled. And that 
pedigree is set out at length both by Saint Matthew 
and by Saint Luke. Not however without startling 
comment which has not always received accurate 
attention by scholars. On the escutcheon of 
Joseph, there appears more than once what heralds 
call the bar sinister. It was of Tamar, who 
“played the harlot,’ that Judah begat his son 
Phares. It was of Rahab, “ the harlot,’ that Sal- 
mon begat Boaz. It was of Ruth, “the Moab- 
itess,’ that Boaz begat Obed. And it was of “ her 
that had been the wife of Uriah,” the significantly 


76 HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 


unmentioned Bathsheba, that David begat Solo- 
mon. And Luke traces the ancestry of Joseph back 
to Adam himself, the symbol of him who has 
sinned. As the adopted “son” of Joseph, Jesus 
was entitled to that legal pedigree. But the very 
Evangelists who set out the pedigrees are the 
Evangelists who furnish a full narrative of the 
other and the divine paternity. For them, it was 
not enough that legally the Messiah should be the 
heir of David, of Abraham, of Adam. As we read 
in the Epistle to the Hebrews, he must be “a priest 
forever after the order of Melchisedec ”—that 
Melchisedec who was “king of righteousness ” 
and “king of Peace’’—without mother, without 
father, without descent, having neither beginning 
of days nor end of life, but made like unto the Son 
of God.” 

The statement that the Virgin Birth is mentioned 
and implied only in two gospels and nowhere else, 
may be dismissed as simply one of many assertions, 
ex parte, of modern criticism in a transient mood 
of negativism. Whoever was Our Lord’s father, 
He certainly had a mother and that mother cer- 
tainly knew the facts. It was not until she had 
lived many years in the company of the disciples 
that Mary died. The Early Church had thus a 
direct witness in her midst on this question, now to 
be determined. The disciple to whom Our Lord 
resigned His care of Mary was Saint John, and by 
tradition at any rate, it is to Saint John that we 


HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 77 


owe the Fourth Gospel. One of his favorite 
phrases, applied to Jesus, is “ only begotten Son of 
God.” It is a phrase about the meaning of which 
it is not easy to entertain a doubt. If he had 
merely said that Jesus was the Son of God, we 
might have argued, perhaps, that there is a true 
sense in which we are all sons of God, or ought to 
be. But an “only begotten”’ son means, and can 
only mean a son of God in a sense in which none 
other is God’s son. We may accept this as a fact 
or we may reject it, but the claim could not have 
been expressed in plainer terms. 

And if the words of Christ be truly reported, the 
claim is one which He Himself asserted. “‘ Thou 
art not yet fifty years old,” said the Jews to Him 
as they were contending in the Temple, “ and hast 
thou seen Abraham?” He answered, Verily, 
verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. 
The word there translated “ verily ” is the Hebrew 
word “ Amen.” It means faithful and is used in 
the Apocalypse for God. Never did a more terrific 
asseveration pass man’s lips than the repeated 
“verily, verily’ of Jesus. And that His hearers 
understood what He meant is shown by the fact 
that they “took up stones to cast at him.” 

When Jesus was on trial before Pilate, the same 
point arose. After He had been scourged, and 
was menaced by the awful cry for crucifixion, the 
precise charge against Him was formulated by the 
Jews in the words, “ We have a law, and by our 


78 HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 


law He ought to die, because he made himself the 
Son of God.” As a prisoner, Jesus was never 
silent when there was a genuine misunderstanding 
to be cleared up. He spoke frequently to Pilate. 
If He had been the son of Joseph, how easy to say 
so! In fact, as the Way, the Truth and the Life, it 
was the clear duty of Christ to make it plain that 
there was a misapprehension, that He had spoken 
of God as His Father, only as we all speak of God 
as our Father, that there was no especial divinity 
implied in His claim, which had only to be in- 
terpreted in a spiritual sense. Rather than utter 
that explanation, Our Lord went to the Cross. 
The precise indictment on which at the end He was 
convicted was that He claimed what we today call 
the Virgin Birth. This was the very essence of 
the alleged blasphemy. 

Men are defective in imagination when they ask 
what difference it makes, here and now, whether or 
not Christ was a son of Joseph. Tell a white man 
that he has colored blood in his veins and you will 
soon discover the importance of paternity. Tell 
the British Empire that King George was not the 
son of his father, and you will discover the im- 
portance of paternity. On paternity depends a 
man’s health, his face, his character; and the very 
kernel of John 3:16, with its promise of the full 
life, here and hereafter, is that ‘‘ God so loved the 
world that he gave his only begotten Son.” It was, 
I think, Lord Morley who, in his “ Life of Glad- 


HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? OMS 


stone,’ says of a certain politician that he had the 
fatal fault of underestimating the importance of 
the problems with which he had to deal. They 
who talk as if the birth of Our Lord were a mere 
incidental of faith are victims of the same error. 

It was from His Mother that Our Lord received 
the truth of His birth. Twice are we told by Saint 
Luke that she kept these things and pondered them 
in her heart. When Christ was twelve years old, 
He was left behind in Jerusalem, and His mother, 
when she found Him, said to Him, “ Thy father 
and I have sought thee sorrowing.” But there 
came from the Boy an answer which was obviously 
a quiet rebuke and an implied disclaimer. ‘“‘ How 
is it,’ He asked, “that ye sought me? Wist ye 
not that I must be about my Father’s business? ” 
The rabbis, then as now, “ understood not the say- 
ing which He spake unto them.” But His mother 
knew what He meant by that distinction between 
Joseph and His Father and she was silent. She 
also knew who He was at the marriage feast of 
Cana, where she said, ‘‘ Whatsoever He saith unto 
you, do it.” And while it is true that for a time 
His own brothers did not believe on Him, that im- 
perception did not survive His death and triumph 
over the tomb. James was then ready to proclaim 
himself “a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus 
Christ.” And Jude, while ready enough to be 
known as “the brother of James,’ was insistent 
that he was “servant of Jesus Christ,” to whom 


80 HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 


frequently in his Epistle he renders the divine 
honor. 

Not that Our Lord Himself ever, as it were, in- 
truded His high birth into the conversation of the 
day. The genuine aristocrat is never assertive; 
but, in humblest guise, he is none the less well- 
bred. Whatever was the birth of Christ, His love 
was even greater. His birth was an event. The 
love is an event for evermore. And therefore 
there were many who came to Him and received 
His goodness without appreciating in precise terms 
His incarnation. The thief, whose cross was next 
to the Cross of Christ, did not discuss the Annunci- 
ation. And his testimony is all the more remark- 
able because it was based, not on creeds, but on 
personal contact. He observed the apparent felon 
and declared Him to be a king—that is, a man of 
regal birth. Similarly, the centurion who ex- 
claimed, “ Truly, this was the Son of God ’”’—he 
also observed the Christ and found it impossible to 
avoid an even more stupendous conclusion, namely, 
that He was of divine birth. 

And that is the reason why the Church as a 
whole will never be able to surrender the mystery 
of Christmas. If Christ be absent from our com- 
pany, then, doubtless we can discuss what has been 
called “the historicity” of His mother’s honor in 
a detached manner. But if He be present, as He 
is always present when two or three are gathered 
together in His Name, it is not quite so easy even 


HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 81 


for scholars and critics to make free with the evi- 
dence appertaining to this case. We all remember 
the saying that if Shakespeare were to enter the 
room, we should rise to our feet, but that if Christ 
were to enter, we should sink to our knees. So 
worshipping the Saviour, there would be in us a 
certain incongruity if we were to say to His face 
what we say behind His back about His Mother. 

If, when challenged in the Court of Criminal 
Law, He did not waver about His origin, it was 
because He was the Truth, and with the Truth, 
however strange, He refused to tamper. But there 
was another reason. His mother was then in 
Jerusalem and this was a matter in which her 
reputation was as much at stake as his own. If 
He had pronounced her to be an impostor, the very 
devils of cynicism would have mocked the angels’ 
chorus. He stood firm and He died and the whole 
world keeps His birthday. 

Hence, we are able to pray at “the Nativity of 
Our Lord ”—“ commonly called Christmas Day ”’: 
Almighty God, who hast given us thy only-begotten 
Son, to take our nature upon him, and as at this 
time to be born of a pure virgin; Grant that we 
being regenerate, and made thy children by adop- 
tion and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy 
Spirit; through the same Our Lord Jesus Christ, 
who liveth and reigneth with thee and the same 
spirit ever one God, world without end, Amen. 

To what Tennyson, in his “ Christmas Carol,” 


82 HOW WAS CHRIST BORN? 


called ‘the faithless coldness of the times” there 
is thus today, as there was sixty years ago, an 
answer. Not that Our Lord Himself would desire 
that His birth should be an occasion of anger 
among His disciples who differ about it. What- 
ever else we may think about Christmas, it was at 
least meant to be a season of peace and goodwill 
among men. But speaking for myself, if I may so 
far presume, I am thankful that I have not been 
called upon by the Spirit to doubt or to question 
an event so inevitable as this, that, in appearing 
amongst us, Jesus, the Son of God, was born of 
God; and that in Him, thus born, we also may be 
born of God, so becoming His brethren, achieving 
His mastery over evil and sharing the high privi- 
leges of His divine estate in the Court of the 
Eternal. 


VII 
CAN CHRIST SAVE? 


E, who are responsible for newspapers can- 
not avoid the ugly facts of life. We are 
confronted by the necessity of reporting 

daily the crimes, the adulteries, the wars, the slan- 
ders, which are perpetrated by a generation where 
men and women think that they are rising superior 
to religion. It is only in sermons, therefore, and 
particularly in up-to-date sermons, that the word 
“sin” is, today, obsolescent. It is so pleasant to 
live under the influence of a narcotic in a world of 
large vague words which sound learned, and mod- 
ern, and liberal, but mean nothing to the man in 
actual trouble. Suppose that one is ill. What 
comfort would it be if a doctor, at the bedside, 
were to deliver an abstract homily on the general 
tendency of research into diseases of the lungs or 
of the heart? In such a crisis, one asks, not for 
culture, but a cure. One does not require instruc- 
tion but healing. And one expects the doctor to 
decide, not to doubt. His duty is diagnosis. And 
after diagnosis, prescription. 

I am bound, therefore, to introduce into these 
pages the ugly fact of sin. What compels me to 


83 


84 CAN CHRIST SAVE? 


face this phenomenon is not faith but science. As 
there are diseases of the body, so, obviously, there 
are diseases of the soul, the mind, the will, of 
whatever within me is myself. The one peril 
against which doctors warn us is our habit of 
concealing from the physician a known disease. 
And, here as elsewhere, the rule of science is the 
rule of religion. “If,” so declares Saint John, 
“we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and 
the truth is not in us.” It is only by uncovering 
the leprosy that it can be cleansed. “If we con- 
fess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us 
our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteous- 
ness.” In Christ, there is a penetrating X-ray 
which pierces the corruption and destroys it, leav- 
ing the soul as the soul of a little child. Hence 
Our Lord’s statement that ‘‘ joy shall be in heaven 
over one sinner that repenteth [or is changed in 
mind] more than over ninety-and-nine just persons 
which need no repentance.” It is the attitude of 
the modern state which insists upon the medical 
examination and treatment of boys and girls in a 
school clinic lest there be original disease. So with 
original sin. Let it be detected in the earliest 
stages. It was because He came to save His people 
from their sins, that Our Lord was called Jesus. 
The word means Saviour. And to save was His 
life-work. 

From the fact of sin, our modern science offers, 
therefore, no release. Indeed, science cannot insist 


CAN CHRIST SAVE? 85 


on law without showing us how frequently these 
laws are broken. “ Behold,’ wrote Saint Paul, 
“thou art called a Jew and restest in the law. . . . 
Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through 
breaking of the law dishonourest thou God?” As 
with the laws of Moses, so with the laws of nature. 
To the professors in their laboratories, as to the 
Pharisees in their synagogues, we may say: “‘ Thou 
that makest thy boast of the laws of nature, dis- 
honourest thou science?” The laws of science 
cannot save. Again to quote Saint Paul, they are 
merely the schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. 
They show us where we have come short of the 
glory of health and of wisdom, and thus include 
us all, as did the Jewish law, under sin. 

The symptoms of this dread disease are broadly 
two—iniquity and transgression. Iniquity means 
missing one’s aim. ‘Transgression means exceed- 
ing one’s duty. And both iniquity and transgres- 
sion imply that the sufferer is not quite sane. A 
girl, however beautiful and charming, who lives 
for money alone, and a man, however able and 
diligent, who lives for money alone, are, in the 
strict sense of the term iniquitous, and both of 
them need to be healed. Their life is not worth 
such living. It is right to be decisive; it is trans- 
gression to lose your temper. It is right to love; 
it is transgression to lust. It is right to earn; it is 
transgression to covet. It is right to bear witness; 
it is transgression to bear false witness. It is right 


86 CAN CHRIST SAVE? 


to persuade men; it is transgression to persecute 
men who are not persuaded. Nor are these evils 
the imaginary myths attributed so often to the 
Churches. When the Kaiser transgressed into 
Belgium, it cost twenty million lives. If sin is 
omitted from our sermons, it does not mean that 
drink, and divorce, and murder, and theft, and 
graft, and suicide are omitted from society and 
politics. We merely substitute the penitentiary for 
the penitent form and the Criminal Court for 
the Christ. 

To deny “ the fall of man”’ is to utter a negative 
that leads us nowhere. Whether or not there was 
*‘ a fall of man,” it is at least certain that there was 
a fall of this man. The fact that Herbert Spencer 
was a philosophic scientist does not mean that he 
was a successful saint. On the contrary he was 
querulous, difficult, opinionated, and intolerant of 
what he failed to appreciate, and no man ever ex- 
hibited more clearly the lack of the larger mind 
that there is to be found alone in Christ. It is Our 
Lord Who taught us how to read the Book of 
Genesis. He said that the kingdom of heaven, 
which means the command of happiness, is within 
us. The Garden of Eden is within us. The Tree 
of Knowledge is within us. Of that age-long 
drama of temptation and exile from the regions of 
innocence, we are ourselves the stage; our lives are 
the setting. They who deny the fall of man sug- 
gest that we were more wicked as babies than we 


CAN CHRIST SAVE? 87 


are as adults. It is the exact reverse of what every 
day of our lives we observe. And what Christ 
said was that we must be born again, must again 
become as little children, if we would enter the 
kingdom of God. He said this because He knew 
what was in man. His eye could see through the 
veil of flesh to the disease within. On sin, He was 
the Expert. 

That there has been a serpent in our Eden is 
obvious. What is satire, what is cynicism, what is 
malice, except the trail of the serpent? Whence 
the serpent came into Eden, we are not told, nor 
has anyone ever found out. Read a library of 
books on ethics and you will not discover one hint 
of the origin of evil. All the accumulated thought 
of thousands of years leaves us with what we learn 
in that ancient and now oft-derided chapter of 
Genesis, not a syllable less and not a syllable more. 
That evil excludes us from Eden, destroys our com- 
munion with God, and instigates Cain to kill his 
brother Abel; and that man himself must somehow 
defeat evil by bruising the serpent’s head—this is 
the sum total of what today, in the twentieth cen- 
tury, we know of this matter. 

In the Old Testament, the clue to which mystery 
is so ill understood, we are able to analyse man’s 
struggle with sin. We learn that the malady is 
universal and that a change of environment is no 
remedy. Cain and Abel were farmers; that was 
the simple life, but in the simple life, as Thomas 


88 CAN CHRIST SAVE? 


Hardy has shown, there was sin. Enoch, on the 
other hand, “ builded a city,’ but the fate of 
Jericho showed that a city, even with walls that 
reach unto heaven and “scrape the sky,” needs a 
defence against sin. In art, there was no salva- 
tion. Jubal “was father of all such as handle the 
harp and organ”’; but how easily was music de- 
graded to the worship of the Golden Calf and the 
impious tyranny of King Nebuchadnezzar who 
used “‘ the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut 
and dulcimer”? merely as a signal for humiliation 
before his despotism. Industry did not cure sin. 
There was Tubal-cain, “an instructor of every 
artificer in brass and iron,’ founder therefore of 
metal-work, but it was of that very iron and 
brass that man forged his fetters. Romance did 
not help. With the sons of God marrying the 
daughters of men, the wickedness, we read, was 
great in the earth. Nor did an age of athletics 
alleviate the trouble. There were “ giants in the 
earth in those days.” They were “men of re- 
nown.” ‘They could have been photographed for 
the newspapers. But the verdict of the Lord was, 
“ He also is flesh.” Chosen for his stature, King 
Saul committed suicide. 

To get rid of sin became the one aim of the 
greatest men of every generation. ‘To Noah, re- 
demption meant an ark for the elect family of God; 
his ideal was safety from the flood which destroyed 
everyone else; but to be safe did not mean to be 


CAN CHRIST SAVE? 89 


sinless; and the last glimpse we have of Noah is 
one of drunkenness and shame. And after Noah, 
came men who dismissed as old-fashioned his idea 
of personal salvation and declared for a change in 
the social system. Organise, said they, your way 
to heaven; and so rose the Tower of Babel. But 
here again, bricks and mortar did not save men 
from sin. On the contrary, the First International 
was rent by rivalries. To have one system, like 
Bolshevism, was not enough. What society needed 
was not a system but a Saviour. 

Abraham, in his turn, was the earliest of the 
pilgrim fathers. It was his idea to start life afresh 
in a new world where, building an altar unto the 
Lord, he would enjoy a full liberty of worship. 
But into that land of promise, Abraham carried 
not only his ideals. His imperfections also pursued 
him, and the nation he founded was borne back 
ultimately into the very valley of Chaldea from 
which Abraham set forth and there suffered a cap- 
tivity of which Abraham was never conscious. 
Emigration does not save people from sin. 

Joseph devoted his energies to fighting famine. 
He was the Hoover of his day, the food-controller 
of the land of Egypt. It was good work but it was 
not the Gospel. The very measures which Joseph 
adopted only served to concentrate power in the 
hands of Pharaoh and so paved the way for the 
appalling industrial slavery under which, at a later 
date, the Israelites groaned until their cry of 


90 CAN CHRIST SAVE? 


angtiish entered into the ear of the Lord God of 
Sabaoth. Laboring for the meat that perisheth, 
feeding the children in Russia—it is all excellent 
and necessary, but it is not by bread alone that 
man truly lives. 

Moses set up a theocracy. The Church and the 
State were one. The law of man was the law of 
God. The policy of the President was the guidance 
of Jehovah. The pillar of cloud by day and the 
pillar of fire by night together symbolised a perfect 
national religion. But within that chosen nation, 
there was sin. To atone for sin, not a day passed 
without the sacrifice of bulls and goats. The 
national worship of God was not enough. The 
very sons of Eli, the Highpriest—Hophni and 
Phineas—became corrupt. And the last of Jewish 
temples was built by Herod the Great who tried to 
kill the Christ. 

So with the Judges. These were men who in- 
sisted—and rightly—that by itself the law is not 
enough. What also matters is the honesty with 
which the law is administered. The Judges were 
thus citizens who, in office, did justice. But the 
greatest of them in exploits, Samson, failed in his 
private life and died a captive to his own immoral- 
ity ; while Samuel, the greatest of them in sagacity, 
left no successor and was compelled to nominate a 
king. Among the Jews, among the Romans and 
among the Greeks, the Republic failed and was 
succeeded by royalty. 


CAN CHRIST SAVE? 91 


And was royalty any improvement? Saul, a sui- 
cide; David, a repentant adulterer ; Solomon, a per- 
vert to idolatry; Rehoboam, who split the nation; 
Jeroboam, who made Israel to sin; what dynasties 
of disillusionment! Yet with a Hes everything 
had been tried and everything had failed. 

Hence there arose men called the prophets who 
said to themselves that it was useless to put one’s 
trust in princes. Not only Israel and Judah, but 
Edom and Moab and Tyre and Egypt and Nineveh 
and Babylon, despite all their power, despite all 
their pride, despite all their pleasures, despite 
all their riches, were doomed by the one pervading 
epidemic of sin. Against sin, it was futile to array 
the chariots and horsemen of militarism. Sin was 
a heart-disease and it was to the heart that a 
remedy must be applied. Purge me with hyssop 
and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be 
whiter than snow. 

It was not that the prophets attacked Noah and 
Abraham and Joseph and Moses and Samuel and 
David, the King. But they knew that, as saviours, 
they had failed. Yet a saviour was wanted. They 
said of their own day what we say of Europe to- 
day, that “the whole head is sick and the whole 
heart, faint.” Someone, therefore, was needed in 
whom would be found the foresight of Noah, the 
insight of Abraham, the sagacity of Joseph, the 
courage of Moses, the equity of Samuel and 
the royal prestige of David. 


92 CAN CHRIST SAVE? 


Brooding over the hope of such a man, the 
prophets and psalmists began to piece together his 
biography. He would come as a child. But He 
would be wonderful, a Counsellor; yes, and more 
than that. He would be “the mighty God” and 
“the Everlasting Father”? among men—not only 
a king of Israel, but “the Prince of Peace” of 
whose government there should be no end. The 
deity of Our Lord was thus no improvisation of 
Paul in Arabia. It was declared centuries before 
Jesus appeared in Nazareth. Nor was it a mere 
dream. ‘These men, in their agony over pain and 
oppression and wickedness, came deliberately to the 
conclusion that unless God Himself visited men, 
our race would perish. And this is not a later 
supposition by theologians of what the prophets 
thought. I am no theologian. But I have eyes in 
my head and I can read plain print. The Bible has 
it down in black and white. 

These seers saw even more deeply into the 
mystery of salvation. That a Saviour must be 
God was not their only certainty. Though the 
Saviour was God, yet—so they thought—would 
He be despised and rejected of men, a man of 
sorrows and acquainted with grief. That also was 
said, centuries before Christ came. ‘These prophets 
had found out by hard experience that men are apt 
to be rebels against right. Until men be righteous, 
no king who reigns in righteousness can be popular. 
He must needs grow up as a tender plant and as a 


CAN CHRIST SAVE? 93 


root out of adry ground. He would have no form 
nor comeliness and when men saw him, there 
would be no beauty that they should desire Him. 
And to be rejected of men means, for a king, to die. 

And yet death would not be defeat. The twenty- 
second Psalm—which, by the way, is a miracle of 
literature that no criticism and no scholarship has 
either explained or explained away, actually de- 
scribes the crucifixion in detail, closing with a pzean 
of victory; how “the kingdom is the Lord’s and 
he is the governor of the nations,’ how “all the 
kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.” 
The Saviour might suffer to the extremity of tor- 
ture. His bones might be torn asunder, as on the 
Cross. His tongue might cleave to his mouth with 
thirst, as on the Cross. Dogs or Gentiles might 
compass Him and pierce His hands and His feet, 
as on the Cross. His body might be exposed, as 
on the Cross. And they might part His garments 
among them and cast lots for His vesture. But, 
despite all that, “a seed shall serve him” and “ it 
shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.” 

Those were the actual words, read in the syna- 
gogues on the Sabbath, for generations before 
Christ came. As a boy, He heard them thus read. 
And He accepted a destiny, thus dreadful and thus 
glorious. He became obedient unto death, even the 
death of the Cross. He died to save us. 

Did He succeed? or must we include Him 
among all the many men, great and good in their 


94 CAN CHRIST SAVE? 


way, who wanted to save their fellows and failed? 
On the answer to this question depends the fate of 
mankind. For sin, like disease, is followed by con- 
sequences. It is not merely a misfortune; it 1s 
also a fault in ourselves and an injury to others. 
On the one hand, we cannot forgive ourselves. 
And on the other hand, there is nobody else to 
forgive us. It is within our own selves that we 
are ashamed. And it is this shame which drives 
us from church, which shuts up for us the Bible, 
which alienates us from Our Father and His grate- 
ful children. As Shakespeare put it, “Thus con- 
science does make cowards of us all.” We are 
guilty and we know it. 

It is that knowledge which has driven millions of 
sensitive sinners to hard penances. It is that 
knowledge which hardens the face of many a man 
and woman whose best self lies crushed by the 
intolerable memory, called remorse. Our litanies 
are full of pleas for pardon and a yearning for 
mercy. If there be a God, then God is the ultimate 
Judge, and before Him Who knows all, we are 
afraid to appear. We hope that God is love, but 
we are sure that God is justice. 

About Our Lord, there is this admitted fact, 
that no one convicted Him of sin; that no one now 
suggests that He could have sinned. Nothing that 
He suffered in dying can have been His own fault. 
Everything was, therefore, the fault of others. 
And not one of us can have sinned against God 


CAN CHRIST SAVE? 95 


or a neighbour more deeply than they sinned who 
crucified Christ. Yet He still loved mankind and 
still forgave. If, then, He on the Cross could and 
did thus forgive all who sinned against Him, we 
must forgive all who sin against us, and it is clear 
that, if we so forgive, He also will and does con- 
tinue to forgive us. ‘“ There is, therefore, now no 
condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” 
Christ has died. And in dying, He pardoned. 
To those, then, who desire a relief from the 
sense of guilt, of shame, perchance of secret shame 
and guilt, which for years may have blighted their 
happiness, I would say that there is no need to dis- 
turb the mind over the abstruse phrases which 
Christ Himself never used. We have all read how 
Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his own son as 
an atonement for sin and how his hand was stayed 
at the sight of a ram, caught in a thicket by his 
horns, which became an alternative victim. So 
ended the possibility of human sacrifices in the 
worship of Jehovah—those sacrifices of children 
which continued for centuries among the neigh- 
bouring nations. But as a remedy for sin, the 
four-footed scapegoat of Moses was not enough. 
If a lamb was to be slain for sin, it must be, as 
John the Baptist expressed it, “the Lamb of 
God.” He, and He only, could take away the sin 
of usall. It is not a creed that rescues us; it is the 
Christ. It is not a word like “atonement.’’ It is not 
an adjective like “ substitutionary ” or “ vicarious.” 


96 CAN CHRIST SAVE? 


It is a person. As Paul put it, God “spared not 
his own Son but delivered him up for us all,” to 
be, in Christ’s own phrase, “a ransom for many.” 

And this means that through days of despair and 
through nights of doubt and sorrow, the anguish 
of failure to be good, the misery of a ruined self- 
respect, when we cry, “ My God, My God, why 
hast thou forsaken me?” we may find Him at our 
side; He Who trod that winepress alone; and we 
may hear His voice, assuring us, “It is I; be not 
afraid.” “Who is he that condemneth?” asked 
Paul; “it is Christ that died.” And Christ, writing 
on the ground, inscribing His Name of love even 
upon the soil of a downtrodden character, looks the 
fallen man, the fallen woman in the face and de- 
clares: “ Neither do I condemn thee; go, and sin 
no more.” 


Vill 
IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 


ANY of us, who are starting life, suppose 
that Christ came into this world to substi- 
stute new duties for old pleasures. They 

think of religion as a spoil-sport and they resent it. 
Here we all were, enjoying our games like children, 
when the schoolmaster appears round the corner 
and calls us back to compulsory chapel. Now if 
this were really the mission of Christ, then I say 
frankly that it would be no part of my business in 
life to recommend it. I want a good time, and the 
man who never has a good time, seldom if ever, 
remains efucient. In the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, we are told to engage in the pursuit of happi- 
ness, and the greater happiness of the greater 
number is or ought to be the aim of all government. 
And if this be true of statesmen who manage a 
country, how can it be untrue of God Who upholds 
the Universe? Unless God be the devil, what con- 
ceivable reason can He have for making His chil- 
dren miserable? What man ts there of you, asked 
Jesus, whom if Hts son ask bread, wnll he give him 
a stone? Of if he ask a fish, will he gwe him a 
serpent? If we then, being evil, know how to give 
97 


98 IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 


good gifts unto our children, how much more 
shall our Father which is in heaven give good 
things to us who ask him? “Of every tree of 
the garden thou mayest freely eat ’’—that is the 
Magna Carta of mankind; and it was to a young 
man, Timothy, that Paul wrote of the living God, 
who giveth us richly all things to enjoy. His 
watchword was “rejoice in the Lord, and agaim 
I say, rejoice.’ And it is the joy of the Lord 
that is to be our strength. That our garners may 
be full, affording all manner of store; that our 
sheep may bring forth thousands and ten thou- 
sands on our farms; that our oxen may be 
strong to labour; and that there be no complain- 
ing in our streets—these were the hopes of the 
psalmist. And anticipating our statesmanship, he 
cried, Happy ts that people, that is in such a 
case; yea, happy is that people whose God is the 
Lord. It is in the Bible, therefore, that the pur- 
suit of happiness is announced. And it is in the 
lands which the Bible has influenced that the 
art of happiness has been developed. There are 
many Indians, many Chinese, many citizens of 
Japan who adopt the Western manner. ‘There are 
few, if any, Occidentals who adopt the manners 
of the Fast. And I sometimes think that if those 
young people who grouse and grumble over the 
occasional restraints of Christian custom, could 
have a taste of etiquette, let us say, in Nepal or 
Baluchistan, they would appreciate more thankfully 





IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 99 


than they sometimes do, the freedom by which their 
lives are surrounded. 

“Yes,” you say, “that is all very well, but if 
what you tell us is correct, why do holy men and 
women retire into a monastic seclusion and adopt 
a severe rule of life and array themselves in a 
sombre garb? Why is there this talk in England 
of a Nonconformist conscience? Why does the 
Puritan tradition condemn the dance, the drama 
and the race course? Why is the Bible the one 
book that we bind in black? And why is the face 
for Church a long face? The style of sermons is 
as serious as the Sunday when we have to listen to 
them, and we have been told, over and over again, 
that if we would follow the Master, we must sacri- 
fice our amusements. In these amusements we do 
not see that there is any harm and we consider it to 
be unreasonable to ask us to choose, let us say, be- 
tween cards and Christ. Why cannot we have 
Christ and also our cards?” 

These are searching questions. They are sensi- 
ble questions. And I will do what I can to furnish 
an answer. It will be admitted, I think, that the 
question whether we enjoy ourselves, say at the 
theatre or at a dance, depends not only on the play 
or the band, but on ourselves. E;ven the gayest of 
us is not always in the mood for these entertain- 
ments which thus become actually distasteful, like 
food on a voyage when the sea is rough. This is 
the reason why pious people, say in Tibet—or even 


100 IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 


nearer home—torture themselves and undergo in- 
credible penances. This is why the Puritans pulled 
long faces when they went to church. They were 
afflicted by an inner uneasiness, a sense of guilt, a 
shadow over the soul which they were unable to 
dispel; and to suggest to these people that they 
should laugh and sing and join in the pleasures of 
the ballroom would have been as cruel as to tell a 
consumptive, when he coughs, that he is silly not to 
seek for health in a cabaret. 

For instance, there was the case of Mary Mag- 
dalene, a woman of wealth and of fashion, but 
wretchedly miserable amid her social triumphs. Of 
what use would it have been for Our Lord to offer 
her a round of social excitements? What she 
needed was to be rid of seven devils,—the shame, 
the hysteria, the insomnia, the disillusion, the de- 
spair, the jealousy, the horror of advancing age, 
the tyrannous vanity, all of which drive women 
into moody melancholia, aggravated by ragged 


nerves. If Mary Magdalene was happier. at the : 


sepulchre of Our Lord than ever she had been at 
the gladiatorial games, the reason is that Christ 
had saved her from her own self. She was no 
longer running away from a pursuing shadow of 
inescapable remorse. 

Merely to express a hope that we might all of 
us have a fine day would have cost Christ nothing. 
In order to dispel the nightmare of an uneasy con- 
science and relieve sensitive souls of their self- 





IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 101 


torture, He had Himself to endure the Cross, to 
visit “the spirits in prison,’ to share the trouble 
which too often leads to despair and suicide. That 
is why, in the Te Deum, we sing, When thou hadst 
overcome the sharpness of death: thou didst open 
the Kingdom of Heaven—which means the realm 
of happiness—to all believers. Whatever be our 
pleasures, we enjoy them ten times the more when 
we enter into them with a light heart. It is not 
that, in Christ, we are better people than others. 
St. Paul used to call himself the chief of sinners. 
But we are in better company. 

It was thus to set up a kingdom of heaven or 
realm of happiness that Our Lord came. Between 
His aims and our own “pursuit of happiness ” 
there is no conflict. Indeed, it is a true yet startling 
fact that He said more about happiness than He did 
about religion. If there had been no Christ and 
no Bible, there would still have been plenty of 
religion among men, much of it cruel religion. 
Where religion is right, we need more of it, but 
where it is wrong, it should be swept away. What 
Our Lord had actually to combat was thus the 
religion of many Jews, and what St. Paul had to 
criticise was the religion of Athens. When the 
Jews abolished idols, they were attacking religion. 
And when Abraham was released from the obliga- 
tion to sacrifice Isaac, he was correcting religion. 
In the name of religion, Moab and Edom passed 
their children through the fire to Moloch, but the 


102 IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 


prophet Zechariah pleaded for a city, full of boys 
and girls, playing in the streets thereof. In other 
words, if there be a conflict between religion and 
happiness, it is religion that has to be surrendered. 
That is the rule of Christian missions. Every- 
where, the missionary finds religion; in Christ, 
what he offers is a religion of happiness. © 

For what was it that Christ condemned in the 
religion of the Pharisees? It was this very fact 
that they made religion, not a happiness, but a 
burden. One is reminded of the passage in Isaiah, 
in which the prophet gives us God’s impression of 
a worship that is devoid of interest—J am full, said 
Jehovah, of the burnt offerings of rams. I delight 
not in the blood of bullocks. Bring no more vain 
oblations. Your new moons and your appointed 
feasts, my soul hateth. They are a trouble unto me. 
I am weary to bear them. That was strong lan- 
guage to employ, even of a dull Sunday, but it 
shows that the Bible is the one book in the world 
that is bigger and better and brighter than its bind- 
ing. It is not in the Bible that insistence is laid on 
the shadows of life. The Bible is a record rather of 
shadows receding from the soul. The environment 
of God which at first seemed to be fire and cloud, 
became, as Christ revealed the Father, a rainbow; 
and God’s Voice of thunder was stilled to a whisper 
of intimate consolation. ‘The city that He offered 
us was, at first, no more than a City of Refuge 
where we could be safe but that City, illuminated by 





IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 103 


the glory of Christ, gathered unto herself the splen- 
dour of a Bride, adorned for her husband. 

Having found in Christ that peace which passeth 
all understanding, we approach the choice of our 
pleasures as free citizens in the Kingdom of 
Heaven. In these matters, nobody has a right to 
dictate to us or to add to the Bible any new rule 
for us to obey. In his letter to the Colossians, St. 
Paul makes this point abundantly plain. He wrote, 
Let no man judge you in meat, or in drink, or m 
respect of an holy day, or of the new moon, or of 
the Sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to 
come; but the body ts of Christ. 

Those words are, I believe, literally inspired by 
the Holy Ghost and they are strictly in line with 
what St. Paul knew of Christ’s life on earth. One 
of the gravest charges levied against Our Lord was 
this—that He was too fond of joining in the pleas- 
ures of the people. John, they said, came neither 
eating nor drinking; but Jesus broke the Sabbath 
and attended dinner parties. He was in conse- 
quence regarded as a winebibber and a publican, 
and a friend of sinners. If, then, a rising gener- 
ation, today, has to fight a battle for liberty of 
amusements, then in so far as the battle is for hap- 
piness—for real happiness—Christ fought it first. 
He loved the children, playing in the market place, 
and they, with their shrill “ Hallelujahs,” loved 
Him in return. 

In Christ, then, we are entitled to have the best 


104 IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 


of good times. And if you wish to play any par- 
ticular game, or to engage in any particular hobby, 
there is nothing in the Bible to prevent you so 
doing. Of all the trees in the garden, we may 
freely eat—of all save one alone—the tree of the 
knowledge of good and evil. It is just that one 
small reservation which reveals the follower of 
Christ. 

Some of our perplexities over pleasure would 
disappear if we would realise that—in the words 
of the Preacher—there is a time to every purpose 
under heaven. Indeed, he says expressly that there 
is a time to laugh and a time to dance. Nowhere 
in the Bible is it declared that dancing is wrong. 
On the contrary, we read that, after the victory of 
the Israelites over the Egyptians, Miriam, the sister 
of Moses, led the women in their dances. Indeed, 
it is characteristic of the father’s wisdom that when 
the prodigal returned from a far country, he did 
not welcome the man with a religious service, but 
with music and dancing. He showed this young 
man that he need not get into bad company in order 
to enjoy himself. Yet pleasure is the most deli- 
cately adjusted of all pieties. Even when his chil- 
dren were feasting together in a brother’s house, 
Job prayed lest they offend God in their hearts. 

Even the fashions are discussed in the Bible. At 
Philippi, it was a seller of purple called Lydia who 
helped Paul to start a Christian church. And why 
not? It was the noble matron in Proverbs who 





A 


ee ee ——ee ee ele ae 


OS 


—_ 


IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 105 


clad her maidens in scarlet. In such matters, even 
St. Paul insists on no more than the standard of 
good taste which is recognised in all the best 
society, the wide world over. He asks that women 
adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shame- 
facedness and sobriety, not with braided hair, or 
gold, or pearls, or costly array. In other words, 
he condemned those exaggerations of fashion 
which seem so absurd to any future generation that 
looks back on them. 

Jewellery, like the bracelets which were a pledge 
to Rebekah of Isaac’s love and loyalty, is praised in 
the Bible. But fantastic jewellery is condemned. 
Isaiah gives us a vivid picture of decadence in the 
Jerusalem of his day—how the ladies were haughty 
and walked with stretched-forth necks and wanton 
eyes, walking and mincing as they go and making 
a tinkling with their feet. He tells of the chains 
and the earrings and the mirrors that they dis- 
played, and he even mentions the little bags that 
they carried which he calls their “‘ houses of the 
soul.” Some may say that these are strangely 
trivial details to include in so solemn a book as the 
Bible. But the answer is that nothing can be 
regarded as trivial which absorbs the attention 
whether of a man or a woman created in the image 
of God. Hence, it is in the Bible that we read how 
Jezebel, the Queen, like Mary Queen of Scots, de- 
voted her last moments before she was hurled into 
eternity, to painting her face and tiring her hair. 


106 IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 


She had a religion. It was the worship of her own 
beauty. And to her religion, she was faithful even 
unto death. 

In addressing “the daughters of Jerusalem,” 
Isaiah pointed out that their paraphernalia cost 
money. Unless there is someone to pay the bills, 
you cannot have these changeable suits of apparel, 
and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping 
pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, 
and the vails. And in a question which he puts into 
the mouth of God Himself, Isaiah asks, What 
mean ye that ye grind the faces of the poor? It is 
God, then, who audits what we spend on amuse- 
ments and insists that we have no right to pleasures 
which involve the sacrifice of others’ right to hap- 
piness. It is not the necessities of life which as a 
rule drive men to rob banks and accept bribes. It 
is the luxury, the display, the larger automobile, 
the expensive dinner, the best seat at a theatre, the 
clothes. In choosing our pleasures, we are thus 
free. But St. Paul tells us to take heed lest by any 
means this liberty becomes a stumbling block to 
them that are weak. If in our pleasures we wound 
the weak conscience, then we sin against Christ. 
And therefore, says St. Paul, if meat make my 
brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the 
world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend. 
It is not your own happiness that should be the 
object but the greatest happiness of the greatest 
number, 





IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 107 


After all, the pleasure which we derive from 
mundane things, can only be for a time. The day 
must come when, in the words of old Barzillai, we 
shall no longer taste what we eat or hear the voice 
of singing men and singing women. If we live 
long, we must grow old, and as the daughters of 
music are brought low, many who trusted in pleas- 
ure say bitterly of life, Vanity of vanities; all ts 
vanity. Hence the insistence of Our Lord that the 
Kingdom of Heaven—the happiness that we can 
command—must be within us; happiness is not a 
cosmetic that can be applied or a limelight that can 
be directed to the countenance. It must radiate 
from the heart, outwards. Any artist will tell you 
that the most satisfying beauty originates beneath 
the surface. Such is the loveliness, even of a plain- 
featured mother as she bends over her child; or of 
a nurse, as she cares for the sick; or of a sister-of- 
mercy, as she prays to the Christ. To be wrapt 
in the service and contemplation of others than 
oneself is the true secret of happiness. 

And if some followers of Christ seem sometimes 
to be indifferent to pleasure, even to legitimate 
pleasure, the reason is that they think, at any rate, 
that they have found a more fascinating occupa- 
tion. It is because they have other things to do. 
Christ, as it were, took their common routine and 
changed it into a career. The question with these 
people is not whether this or that amusement is 
right or wrong, but whether it is worth while. 


108 IS HAPPINESS WRONG? 


When their circumstances change, these people dis- 
play an unexplained serenity of character, as if 
they were sure of an investment that can never 
depreciate in value. They have found a pearl of 
great price, worth all else put together. It is a 
treasure which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, 
nor can thieves break through to steal it. As St. 
Paul grew older, he became richer, not poorer; 
and when at the last all men save St. Luke had 
forsaken him, he was still happy in that “‘ heavenly 
kingdom ”’ where was laid up for him “a crown of 
righteousness’ that would never fade away. In 
the pursuit of happiness, St. Paul thus won the 
race. Narrow is the gate that leads into a life 
worth living, but he found it. And while the 
saints “in glory shine,’ so may we “ feebly strug- 
gle’ and thus share with them the supreme reward. 


IX 
CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 


T is sometimes hinted that preachers have a 
difficulty in preparing their sermons because 
in these days of doubt and enquiry they do not 

quite know what to preach about. For the preacher 
in search of a text, I would suggest, therefore, one 
topic of universal interest on which the Bible offers 
a fascinating field for research. Every day of our 
lives we are affected by the problem of industry, 
by capital and labour, by hours, wages and output, 
by finance and by import and export trade. And 
yet I do not remember hearing, either in church or 
out of it, one intelligent and comprehensive survey 
of what the Bible says on these subjects. Many 
years ago, I put together a few random remarks 
which had no importance save this—that they were 
delivered without alteration to brotherhoods of 
workingmen in the most Socialist areas of London 
and to the most Capitalist clubs and Churches of 
Philadelphia and Chicago. And in both cases, I 
was asked to repeat the discourse. Here then I 
found in the Bible an authority on profits and 
wages which was accepted at once by the man on 
the verge of Bolshevism and the man who pre- 


109 


110 CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 


sides over a bank. In the words of the Bible, 
you can say boih to Capital and to Labour what 
neither Capital nor Labour will accept in any 
other words. For me to have said what I did say 
merely as a personal opinion would have been an 
impertinence. 

One is told that one must no longer believe in 
the literal inspiration of the Bible, and especially 
of the Old Testament. Yet when I read the Old 
Testament, I find in the least expected places a 
number of texts of which every several letter, if 
obeyed, would have saved society billions of dollars, 
of sovereigns, of francs or of any other currency 
you like to select. Take this short and simple state- 
ment—A false balance is [an] abomination to the 
Lord; but a just weight is His delight. When the 
civic authorities applied that text to London, it was 
astounding to find what additions had to be made 
to the sacks in which coal was delivered, and 
what a scrapping there had to be of weights and 
measures! And if a false balance is an abomina- 
tion unto the Lord, so is a false balance sheet. Not 
long ago, I walked up Broadway in New York. In 
buying a paper, I was so careless as to leave a 
quarter on the newsstand. For a whole block, I 
had proceeded when I felt a touch on the arm. It 
was the newsboy, holding in his hand a coin and 
saying, “There, sir, you gave me a quarter too 
much.” ‘That man was not far from the kingdom 
of heaven; and, thought I, if we expect honesty 


CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 111 


among the poor and put cash-registers into our 
stores and restaurants, what is to be said of the 
rich, if their standards of honesty are any the 
less exact ? 

Take another of these billion-dollar verses— 
Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not 
respect persons, neither take a gift: for a gift doth 
blind the eyes of the wise, and pervert the words 
of the righteous. ‘That simple text, if obeyed as 
the Word of God, would have stopped every scan- 
dal that has ever arisen out of graft, bribery and 
corruption. There is scarcely a country in the 
world where the application of those rules would 
not mean a transformation. And yet sometimes we 
can find nothing better to do with the pulpit than 
to belittle the Old Testament as an obsolete collec- 
tion of manuscripts, full of human errors and no 
longer to be read in churches or taken seriously on 
a weekday. If we could but see it, there are in the 
very Scriptures that we abandon, the phrases, on 
the adoption of which or the neglect depends the 
fate of empires. 

On “usury,” the Bible appears to speak with a 
double voice. In the Old Testament, it is con- 
demned. But in the parable of the talents, Our 
Lord expressly authorises the collection of interest 
on invested capital. What the Bible does is to 
draw a clear line between profits and profiteering, 
between a natural return on wealth and extortion. 
And if that distinction were understood, say, in 


112 CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 


India, the country would be transformed. The 
pendence of India on the West is due, mainly, to 
the fact that Indians themselves are unwilling to 
lend money to one another at less than thirty per 
cent interest, on which terms no material progress 
is possible. And the accumulation of jewels in a 
few palaces, with the custom of depositing one’s 
savings not in banks but in bangles, together form 
a perfect illustration of the talent wrapped up in a 
napkin, of which talent there is also a stupendous 
example in the vaults of banks in the United States. 
What Wall Street is to do with its gold reserve 1s 
a question on which Christ had something to say 
two thousand years ago. The money should be put 
to the exchangers. It represents an opportunity for 
unparalleled service to the race. Where railways 
and houses and civilising merchandise are needed, 
here is the credit which can open the door to a 
fuller life. For the Lord thy God blesseth thee, as 
He promised thee: and thou shalt lend unto many 
nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt 
reign over many nations, but they shall not reign 
over thee. ‘True empire consists in genuine finan- 
cial cooperation. 

It was the view of Christ and of his nation that 
debts should be paid, as says the Sermon on the 
Mount, to the uttermost farthing. Hence, the pro- 
found sagacity displayed in the arrangement of a 
Year of Jubilee when such obligations should termi- 
nate. ‘The principle of a fifty-year sinking fund 


CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 113 


was thus laid down, and the abuse of a perpetual 
loan was avoided. There, indeed, you have not 
merely a billion-dollar text, but a billion-dollar 
chapter. If governments and states and cities had 
borrowed no more public money than they could 
repay with interest in fifty years, the saving of 
depreciation in securities would have been incal- 
culable. Why is a sovereign, today, worth no more 
than a shilling, a few hundred years ago? One 
reason is that the wisdom of a jubilee, which 
automatically prevents inflation, has been seldom 
applied. 

In these matters, supposed to be financial and 
economic rather than religious, the Bible has 
pointed the truth with the dead accuracy of a 
compass. Illustrations of this wisdom could be 
multiplied indefinitely ; and one must suffice. There 
is still in the world the curious delusion that if a 
centre of industry sends goods to a consuming 
community in the same country, it is good trade, 
whereas if France sends goods into Germany, it is 
cut-throat competition. In the Bible, you may dis- 
cover the true idea of foreign commerce. We read 
how Solomon, King of Israel, bought cedars of 
Lebanon from Hiram, King of Tyre, while Hiram, 
King of Tyre, received grain and oil from Solo- 
mon, King of Israel. In other words, commerce is 
not mutual injury; it is mutual exchange. If Tyre 
had not imported grain and oil, Israel could not 
have imported timber. It means that prosperity is 


114 CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 


not a national but an international affair. If the 
temple of the Lord is to be in truth the joy of 
the whole earth, then the whole earth must con- 
tribute to its erection. Indeed, the Bible ex- 
poses the fallacy which underlies the suggestion 
that if a country imports more goods than it ex- 
ports, there is “‘an adverse balance of trade.” 
The prosperity of Solomon was measured, not 
by his exports, but by his imports, including ivory, 
apes and peacocks. And so was the prosperity of 
Babylon, as depicted by St. John. A nation, like 
a man, is rich when it can buy things in the open 
market. 

It is not, I think, a matter for surprise that there 
should be so unerring an accuracy in the Scriptural 
treatment of industrial problems. For the founder 
of the Jewish people was himself a merchant and a 
farmer on a large scale. It was Melchizedek, not 
Abraham, who was the priest of Palestine. It 
was Melchizedek who gave Abraham his blessing. 
Abraham, like the other patriarchs, was a man en- 
gaged in business, and it was by his business that 
he reached God. In him, as in Job, we see that the 
rich man may also be righteous. Nor did Our 
Lord ever deny this. What He said was, not that 
it was wrong for a man to be rich, but that it was 
hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of 
heaven. A rich man can easily be honest; but for 
a rich man to be happy—that is difficult. Life, 
says Our Lord, does not consist in the abundance 


CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 115 


of things that a man possesses, but in what he is 
himself. 

In Abraham, then, we have the rich man who 
lived in simple style. When he entertained angels 
unawares, he did not summon his butler, but him- 
self selected the calf, tender and good, which was 
to furnish the evening meal. His wife, Sarah, still 
prided herself on the quality of her cakes which she 
prepared with her own hands. It was Lot who in- 
sisted on a town house in Sodom, whose wife was 
turned to a pillar of salt when she lost her social 
position, whose daughters grew up devoid of the 
innate modesties of womanhood. In Lot, you see 
what Our Lord called the deceitfulness of riches. 
A little salt is good as savour. Even sarcasm has 
its uses. But a disappointed woman, ever regret- 
ting her past and cynical over her present, is an 
infliction. 

In the Bible, then, we have cases of the small 
business which becomes the big business. That 
was true of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and it was 
also true of Lot. And the reason was that the 
businesses in question were meeting a genuine 
public need. These captains of industry served the 
public without seeking to conquer the public. 
When Abraham and Lot found the land too small 
for their herds, there was an excellent opportunity 
for a combine which would have set up a monopoly 
in agricultural produce. But Abraham followed an 
opposite policy. By separating from Lot, he acted 


116 CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 


in the spirit of that great text which was the first 
of all anti-trust laws: Cursed is he that addeth field 
to field until there be no place to dwell in. He ap- 
plied to his business the principle that he had to be 
faithful within it and think little of going beyond 
it. ‘The best managed firms are today the firms 
where a direct personal responsibility is similarly 
maintained. Abraham had no difficulties with his 
workpeople. They knew him as a friend and, in 
battle, went on strike, not against him, but for 
him. In Abraham’s large and well-ordered ranch, 
you see those excellent relations between Capital 
and Labour, between master and servant, which 
St. Paul so well defines in his letters to Ephesus 
and Colosse. 

It is in the Bible that you find the first and the 
most drastic denunciations of the sweating system. 
Like the rest of what we suppose to be the ideals 
of the New Testament, these startling exposures of 
those who grind the faces of the poor are to be 
found equally in the pre-Christian Scriptures. It 
was, perhaps, St. James who summed up in fiercest 
language the wrath of God against the bad em- 
ployer. Behold, he wrote, the hire of the labourers 
who have reaped down your fields, which is of you 
kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them 
which have reaped have entered into the ears of the 
Lord of Sabaoth. On the right of the workman to 
enjoy the fruits of his toil, the Bible is insistent. 
The very expression is derived from its pages. 


CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 117 


And the dignity of labour is constantly set forth. 
We read of the conquered Gibeonites who were 
told by Joshua that they must be forever the hewers 
of wood and drawers of water for the Israelites. 
And then came Christ Who Himself was a Car- 
penter, hewing wood, and Himself drew water with 
which to wash His disciples’ feet. In Peter, the 
fisherman and in Paul, the tentmaker, He found 
His chief apostles. And the Gibeonite, or common 
labourer, found an Elder Brother in the Son 
of God. 

That Labour should combine for good purposes, 
He desired. Bear ye one another's burdens, said 
He, and so fulfil the law of Christ. The strong 
ought to help the weak, so were the disciples 
taught; and thus was first established that prin- 
ciple which has since been elaborated in insurance 
against all the uncertainties of life and health and 
property. The whole of this vast financial machin- 
ery is no more than a social obedience to one or two 
billion dollar texts in the Bible. And it was in com- 
munities alone where the Bible is read that such 
insurance developed. On the other hand, any com- 
bination of labour or of capital which restricts out- 
put has been vetoed in the Bible. Again, one 
quotes a billion-dollar text—Whatsoever thy hand 
findeth to do, do it with thy might. It is Scripture, 
then, that cures the slacker. 

But the employer, on his side, should be careful 
also to walk humbly with his God. It was amid a 


118 CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 


strike of bricklayers in the land of Egypt that the 
Jews were welded into a chosen people. Genuine 
industrial grievances are a cry that reaches the ear 
of Jehovah Himself and no Christian should allow 
such grievances to continue. But about that his- 
toric revolt of organised labour, which was led to 
victory by Moses, there are, perhaps, two observa- 
tions to be made. First, the mere strike, successful 
though it was in the spoliation of the Egyptians, 
did not bring the labour unions into the promised 
land. In fact, the very wealth of which they had 
despoiled their employers, became an object—as 
in Moscow today—of mammon-worship among 
themselves. And it was not until they had re- 
ceived the ten commandments and made sacri- 
fices for a common worship of God in the 
tabernacle, that they were fit to enjoy the milk 
and honey which had seemed to be so easily within 
their reach. 

Also, that one and only strike recorded in Scrip- 
ture was, curiously, not against a private employer 
at all, but against a system of state socialism repre- 
sented by Pharaoh, or as in Britain we say, the 
Crown. Faced by famine, Joseph had nationalised 
the food supply of Egypt and, with it, much other 
property, previously held by the individual citizen. 
That he had strong reason to play the part of a 
Hoover is certain, but in Egypt, as in Russia, this 
communism in due course led to tyranny, and es- 
pecially to a suppression of the right to worship 


CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 119 


God. ‘The Jews never forgot the lesson. That 
every family should have its own vine and its 
own figtree was a basic principle of their economic 
policy. Their revenues were limited strictly to a 
tithe or tenth of the national income. And the 
remaining nine-tenths was left to the sole enjoy- 
ment of the individual. 

There is no especial characteristic of industrial 
reform, the seed of which was not planted in men’s 
minds by the Bible. If, today, we fence machinery 
in order to prevent accidents, so did the Jew, thou- 
sands of years ago, ordain that every roof must 
have its parapet, also to prevent accidents. And 
when Labour today asks for one clear day of rest 
in seven and a reasonable annual holiday for every 
worker, Labour is unconsciously applying to mod- 
ern industry the ancient and inspired calendar of 
the Jewish people, which also ordained one day rest 
in seven. And if social reformers have urged the 
wisdom and justice of pensions for the aged and 
of provision for widows and orphans, they are 
mierely echoing the programme of men who wrote 
many centuries before Christ was born, who also 
pleaded for the orphan, the widow and the aged. 
‘There are many mystical aspects of the faith which 
I do not pretend to understand. But on questions 
of capital and labour and finance, I am supposed to 
be informed. And it has been from no textbook on 
economics other than the Bible that I have derived 
the clear and unanswerable axioms of commerce 


120 CAN CHRISTIANS EARN A LIVING? 


upon which every banker, every manufacturer, 
every merchant, every retailer, and every wage- 
earner must base his daily conduct of affairs, if, in 
his calling and his service, he is, in common par- 
lance, to make good, 


xX 
DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 


VERY year, an increasing multitude of 
students, both men and women, proceed to 
college, where they are brought into con- 

tact with the latest results of science. Faced by a 
mass of new knowledge, which genius itself could 
not easily assimilate, these students ask the crude 
question—whether science and religion can be 
harmonized? Of actual life, such students have 
not had, as yet, any experience. In most cases, 
they have still to suffer the facts of pain and sor- 
row and disillusionment with which science, as they 
are taught it, is powerless to deal. It does not 
occur to them that the easy faith which seems to 
be enough for a ’Varsity boat race or a game in the 
Yale Bowl may fail under the severer tests of 
wealth and poverty, of temptation, marriage and 
the great uncertainties of flattery and neglect. In 
the drama which we call Life, these students are 
playing the first act; but in all drama, it is in the 
second, the third, or even the fourth act that the 
inner trend towards happiness or tragedy is made 
manifest. And society, today, is strewn with the 
wreckage of lives which began brightly enough, 
121 


122 DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 


but failed under the stiff stress of later ex- 
perience. To these casualties, the scientific pro- 
fessors have contributed their full percentage of 
victims. 

To suppose that students, as a class, are hanker- 
ing after heresy is a mistake. If they declined to 
attend their appointed lectures, they would be re- 
fused their graduation. In this situation, therefore, 
the lecturer has the advantage. It is he who has 
force on his side. He can dictate. In his class- 
room, he is absolute monarch of all he surveys. 
And, as a rule, he is the last man in the world who 
should complain that he is denied a reasonable lib- 
erty of utterance. The greater the freedom, the 
greater, surely, is the responsibility. A lecturer, 
who advances rapidly-changing hypotheses as if 
they were ascertained truths, is guilty of intel- 
lectual fraud on his university. And if, by his 
tone and temper, he makes faith harder for his 
students—who at that very moment may need the 
help of Christ in their struggle between virtue and 
vice—he will not be held guiltless when he appears 
before the final judgment seat. It was Jesus, Him- 
self, Who said of anyone who caused a child of 
His to stumble, that it were better for him that a 
millstone were hanged about his neck and that he 
were drowned in the depth of the sea. ‘To under- 
mine the beliefs of young men and women is a 
capital offence against the individual, the nation 
and the race, All honour to the many masters of 


DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 123 


sound learning who decline to be party to any such 
enterprise. 

On the other hand, it is not only in the colleges 
that young people sometimes have their faith upset. 
Whatever is unreal in the churches, they are quick 
to detect. And great offence has been caused by 
those who have urged upon the young what Christ 
never said. Take evolution. Nowhere in the Bible 
are we ever authorized to make evolution a test of 
Christ’s love for the individual. On the contrary, 
Paul stated expressly—in words which I, for one, 
believe were literally inspired—that neither things 
present nor things to come—words which clearly 
include the discoveries and theories of science— 
shall be able to separate us from the love of God 
which 1s in Christ Jesus Our Lord. Suppose that 
you saw a man drowning and, in order to save him, 
risked your life. Would you, as you gripped him, 
demand of him, before pulling him to shore, 
whether he believed in the indestructibility of mat- 
ter or the dissipation of energy? And do you sup- 
pose that Christ, Who did not risk His life only but 
gave it for those who are in peril, would deny His 
great salvation to a man merely because that man 
believed—whether rightly or wrongly—in the writ- 
ings of certain biologists and other scientists? If 
they who think this, had themselves suffered the 
agony of crucifixion, their view would be very dif- 
ferent. It was for no geological correctitude that 
Christ submitted to the nails, the spear and the 


124 DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 


thorns. ‘I'o those, then, who would fetter my mind 
with restraints, whether scientific or theological— 
for it makes no difference which—I answer that I 
intend to stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ 
hath made me free, nor will I consent to be en- 
tangled again in the yoke of bondage. 

The word “science”? is merely a synonym for 
knowledge. And to be scientific is to know. It 
was the aim of Our Lord that we should have life 
and have it more abundantly. And as knowledge 
is a part of life, He wanted us to have that also. 
“See with your eyes,” was His message; “hear 
with your ears; touch with your hands; touch even 
the leper; handle even the dead; there is nothing 
common or unclean; there is nothing hid that shall 
not be known; go ye into all the world; discover all 
nations; rend the veil of the Temple itself; reach 
hither thy finger and behold my hands; and reach 
hither thy hand and thrust tt into my side; and be 
not faithless, but believing. ‘The keener the science 
and the firmer—so suggests Our Lord—is to be 
the faith. That also was the impulse of Paul. 
Now, he said, we see through a glass darkly; but 
then face to face: now £ know in part; but then 
shall I know even as also I am known. Perfect 
knowledge was to be perfect love, for perfect 
knowledge is of God; and God is love. 

It is the aim of the Bible, therefore, to enable us 
to know this world, past, present and future, so 
that we be no longer “infants crying in the night 


DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 125 


and with no language but a cry,” but grown men, 
grown women, who face the light and dare the 
truth. But as God loves the many and not merely 
the few, so is the Bible written, not for the few 
only, but for the many. Ninety-nine out of every 
hundred persons would be neglecting their plain 
duty if they were to spend their days endeavouring 
to master abstruse treatises on geology and mathe- 
matics and evolution. But these ninety-and-nine 
persons, none the less, have as much right as the 
hundredth to know by whom, how and when this 
world was created. What modern scientists tell in 
a whole library, the Book of Genesis tells in a 
chapter. And the Book of Genesis was telling it 
thousands of years before the modern scientist 
was born. 

It is often said that the Bible is not to be trusted 
on questions of science because the people who 
wrote the Bible believed that the world was flat and 
that the sun and moon moved around the earth. 
Now it so happens that, to this day, we use, as a 
habit, such terms as sunrise, sunset and a level 
plain which, taken literally, contradict the teachings 
of Galileo. One can imagine some scholar, a gener- 
ation or so hence, quoting these common expres- 
sions and proving conclusively that most of us still 
held to the obsolete notions; and especially our 
poets, who seldom if ever refer, as they should do, 
to a concave prairie or to dawn as a calm move- 
‘ment of a parallel of longitude from shadow to 


126 DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 


shine of a fixed star. Some of the criticism of the 
Bible needs thus to be taken by the throat and 
laughed out of court. It simply means that the 
critics have no practical acquaintance with the way 
in which a mind gets itself into words. But assum- 
ing that the writers of Scripture did believe that 
the earth was flat and that the sun moved around 
it, does it not seem to be a little strange that they 
never said so in the sacred pages? To give one 
illustration: There was Job thundering forth his 
sombre meditations about the stars, about Arcturus, 
Orion and the Pleiades, but never once did he say 
that they moved round the world; and about the 
pillars of the earth, but never did he say that the 
earth was a plate. You may read into his poetry, 
if you like, the ancient limitations of his period. 
But you may also read into it, if you will, the 
knowledge of our own day. What he wrote was 
true to him, then; and to us also, it is still true. 
And that is one evidence of what has been called 
the inspiration of the Bible. Men wrote therein 
more grandly than they realized. They were like 
Handel, whose music was composed for a mere 
handful of singers and instruments but is only the 
more solemn-sounding when a vast chorus and a 
mighty orchestra render unto heaven the har- 
monious glories of its hallelujahs. 

I am not an archeologist. But I am profoundly 
sceptical of arguments against the Bible, or any- 
thing else, which are based on the theory that, 


DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 127 


compared with our own, former generations in a 
remote past were either barbarous or ignorant. 
That is not the impression when we break into the 
tombs of the ancients; and tombs are the least liv- 
ing element in any civilisation. The idea that a 
young lady toiling at a typewriter on the thirtieth 
floor of a skyscraper is of necessity more thor- 
oughly equipped for speculating on the universe 
wherein she adjusts her hair and adorns her face 
than was Abraham, meditating at eventide in the 
door of his tent, does not convince one who com- 
pares the often delightful prattle of the young lady 
with the far-reaching affirmations of the patriarch. 
The notion that ours is a scientific era has to be 
adjusted to the observed phenomena of human life 
in cities and countryside. 

Take an illustration: In the account of creation, 
we are told that there was a firmament. I have 
seen it argued that the Jewish writers looked upon 
the sky as some kind of concrete roof to which, as 
in the Grand Central Station of New York, stars 
are attached. ‘Therefore it is held that the firma- 
ment was meant to be an enclosed space, from 
which it follows that Genesis is wrong and science 
is right. Here, primarily, I am not arguing for 
the Bible; I am arguing for honest scholarship. In 
Hebrew, the word firmament does not mean “an 
enclosed space”; it means “ space without limit.” 
To say otherwise is to say what is simply an eru- 
dite lie. And that the Jews did not live within a 


128 DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 


horizon of concrete is shown by at least one pas- 
sage—a passage of exquisite significance—in one 
of their greatest psalms, where we read: As far as 
the east is from the west, so far hath he removed 
our transgressions from us. ‘The idea here is an 
illimitable distance; yet not a distance that exceeds 
God. For again we read: Behold, the heaven of 
heavens cannot contain thee. ‘The world of the 
Jew had indeed a remote frontier; but you did not 
reach that frontier until you reached the Creator 
Himself. It was He whose hand upheld the stars, 
and whose being brooded over all His works. The 
science and the scholarship that lack the reverence 
to see this are merely corroborating the wisdom of 
Jesus when He answered and said: I thank thee, O 
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou 
hast lid these things from the unse and prudent, 
and hast revealed them unto babes. 

Let us suppose that, like Robinson Crusoe, you 
were to be cast upon a desert island alone, with 
one book for company, and that book the Bible. 
Lonely, you would have to face the unrelieved en- 
vironment of nature. Night and day, storm and 
heat, the raging sea, the dread of beasts and rep- 
tiles, the stars—these would be your obsession. 
And if you were to remain sane, what would be: 
the thought you would need? The answer is to be 
found, beyond cavil and beyond contradiction, in 
the first chapter of Genesis and only there. Give 
Robinson Crusoe that chapter and, an Adam amid 


DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 129 


a world of animals, he remains upright—a living 
soul, his manhood inviolable. Give him The Origin 
of Species and I am not so sure. The origin of 
species was, after all, God. It was He Who, in the 
beginning, created the heavens and the earth. It is 
not in Darwin, however, but in Genesis where, most 
clearly, you find this truth. It is entirely possible 
for a scientist to look through his microscope and 
his telescope and to collate innumerable observa- 
tions and yet to miss seeing God. Indeed, a scien- 
tist who depends solely on these aids to truth may, 
and often does, fail to find the biggest truth of all, 
Verily, he is a God that hideth himself. And as 
Job put it: Canst thou by searching find out God? 
The Creator is not discovered by our logic; He is 
discovered to our faith. As Jesus said to Peter: 
Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and 
blood hath not revealed it unto thee but my Father 
which is in heaven. ‘There is a proverb which 
asserts that you cannot see the wood for the trees; 
and this suggests science without revelation. 

If our desert islander were to read through the 
first chapter of Genesis, would he be led astray as 
to the facts? I don’t think so. He would learn, 
what has since been confirmed, that creation was 
not a single act but was an elaborate process which 
can be discussed, as our geologists now discuss it, 
in orderly periods. The period is called a day, but 
the day is never called twenty-four hours; on the 
contrary, we are expressly warned against any such 


130 DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 


interpretation. A psalmist tells us that a thousand 
years in God’s sight are but as yesterday when tt 1s 
past and as a watch in the night, and he asserts 
this in a poem where he is considering how the 
mountains were brought forth and the earth was 
formed: From everlasting to everlasting, he cries, 
thou art God. Indeed, St. Peter is particular to 
emphasize this precise point. Beloved, he says, be 
not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with 
the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years 
as one day. Yet with this evidence of the Jewish 
mind—extending over the very centuries which 
yielded us the first chapter of Genesis—there are 
serious scholars and careless scientists who dismiss 
this immortal passage on the ground that the 
writer, with his profound vision of our universe, 
supposed all to have been improvised, let us say, 
between April first and April seventh, inclusive, 
B. Cc. 4004. He who wrote in the Spirit never said 
so and he was never meant to be so understood. 
As a matter of fact, the very word “ period” 
which geologists themselves employ, means what 
is meant by day, namely, a circuit of time. 

That creation was progressive and deliberate is 
thus at once the teaching of the Bible and the later 
discovery of modern science. And there is a mean- 
ing also in the phrase, so oft repeated in Genesis, 
that God looked and found that His work was 
good. There you see the Almighty as an Artist, 
standing back to survey His canvas and then ad- 


DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 131 


ding a touch here, a touch there till all be perfect. 
As we build a house, so did He build the universe, 
not by machinery, but by will, by design, and our 
Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, hearing the 
reverberations of some hidden volcano, trembling 
at the surf which thunders around his home, like 
siege guns bombarding a fortress, is yet assured 
that a Personal Love arranged it, and that as a son 
of the eternal Father, He is remembered in his 
isolation; with the psalmist, he can say, Though 
he slay me, yet will I trust in him. Once more, I 
am not sure whether that truth would have been 
made so plain to him by Charles Darwin. Yet the 
truth means the difference, in such a case, between 
retaining a sane mind and lunacy. And Charles 
Darwin—what about him? Forty years ago, any- 
body who denied the infallibility of Charles Dar- 
win was ridiculed by the whole hierarchy of 
science. But today, scientists themselves compare 
the theories of Darwin with the ideas of Lucretius. 
Science is thus a chamelion that can change its 
colours as change the fashions. It is, in the main, 
concerned with industrious correction of its own 
mistakes. Its theories of light vary as the rainbow. 
Its speculations on thought are driven, hither and 
thither, like clouds around a mountain. 

I am told that I am not to believe in the literal 
inspiration of the Bible. And this. I am assured, 
is the decision of science. To be quite frank, I do 
not understand what is meant by this assertion. 


182 DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 


I should have thought that if there were one qual- 
ity more than another on which true science has 
insisted, it is the quality of exactitude. The 
microscope, the telescope, the chemist’s scales, the 
seismograph—what are all these instruments ex- 
cept pointers to accuracy? And the only instru- 
ment that is not to be accurate, is the pen! Here, 
as a writer, one spends a whole life endeavouring 
to be precise in the use of words; and one is then 
told that, in the Bible, the precise word does not 
matter very much after all. Of theories, as of 
trees, we may say that by their fruits ye shall know 
them. Our bookshelves are piled up with sloppy 
literature, with the poetry that is neither music nor 
sense, with the story that neither begins nor ends, 
with the sentence that has lost its verb, with the 
trash, often the highbrow trash which is simply 
unreadable to anyone whose taste has been spoiled 
for other books by the incomparable grandeur of 
the Bible. 

In the Bible, it is the exact phrase that does mat- 
ter. It is not with ricketty tables and creaking 
chairs and ill-made bedsteads that your mind is 
furnished. The divine Carpenter knew how to use 
the tee-square and the slide-rule. And what He 
made was right. It was thorough. It was com- 
plete. And there is a tremendous lesson in the 
statement, so often made by American experts, 
that, after pouring billions of dollars into edu- 
cation, from which the Bible is excluded, the 


DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 133 


result is often a mentality of fourteen years of 
age. Of no community where the Bible is thor- 
oughly known has that ever had to be said. The 
real question is not whether Science and the Bible 
can be reconciled, but whether there can be any 
true Science without the Bible. The motion 
picture and the battlefield mean that Science, 
whether frivolous or diabolical, is today on trial. 
It is no longer Scripture that stands in the dock. 
We have seen what mankind becomes without 
Scripture. | 

To examine the story of Creation, verse by 
verse, is here impossible. I will, however, scruti- 
nize one phrase—And the evening and the morning 
were the first—or the second—or the third day. 
Not, you will notice, the morning and the evening, 
which is our way of reckoning time. The Jewish 
universe, like the Jewish day, was born in the 
night. Creation was a process hidden from the 
eye of all save God. Wesee the result. We specu- 
late about it. But we do not know; we cannot ever 
know. ‘The past, like the future, is a divine mys- 
tery—and as we consider it, a hand is laid on our 
eyes and a still, small voice says to us: Thus far 
shalt thou see and no further. 

What, then, the Book of Genesis gives to Robin- 
son Crusoe on his island is a progressive creation 
culminating in man. It is plain, of course, that 
there are in these chapters two accounts of the 
matter, one after the other, and one of the curiosi- 


134 DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 


ties of modern and scientific scholarship is the 
assertion that the accounts do not agree—whence, 
so it is argued, one of them must be wrong. In 
the first account, so we are assured, the world 
and the animals came first, and man afterwards. 
In the second account, man came first with Eden, 
and the animals coming later. Now, the men who 
compiled the Book of Genesis—whoever they were 
and whenever they lived—were not precisely fools. 
And only fools would have put into a book two 
narratives, one of which thus contradicts the other. 
The said compilers were not only men of intelli- 
gence, but they assumed intelligence in others who 
would read their pages. If scholars and scientists 
suppose that they must rid their minds of intelli- 
gence before they read the Bible, naturally they 
get into trouble. 

In the second account of Creation, it never says 
that Adam was created before the animals nor that 
Eden was created after Adam. Nor is it implied. 
The story is told exactly as I have been recently 
writing a certain biography. I began with the 
main character. I then sketched his environment. 
And from time to time I introduced the people he 
met. This does not mean that the man was born 
before his environment, or that all his friends— 
his mother, for instance—were born after he was. 
All that it does mean is that, on the canvas, the 
central figure first attracts the eye. In the first 
account of Creation, the central figure is God and 


DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 135 


it is from His standpoint, as it were, that the scene 
is surveyed. In the second account, the central 
figure is man, and we see creation as man has 
gradually discovered it—the country, its flora and 
its fauna—all without a name until man’s lips 
framed a language. A more exact description of 
the essentials of creation, first from the Divine, and 
next from the human standpoint, has never been 
put upon paper, and never will be. But I must 
repeat—in reading it, you must use the brains 
which God has given you. And let not scientists 
and scholars suppose for a moment that they are 
any less stupid than the rest of us. There has been 
nothing in the annals of the human mind more 
crass in its stupidity than their attitude towards the 
first two chapters of Genesis. It has not been that 
the critics wanted truth. It has been, rather, that 
they did not want truth to include God. 

Take this final point—the fact that man, as dis- 
tinct from animals, became a living soul. For 
Robinson Crusoe on his island, that surely is a 
truth of capital importance. He may dwell amid 
the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and 
the fishes of the sea, but he is neither fish, nor bird, 
nor beast, but the temple of God’s own breath and 
spirit. Between him and other creatures, there is 
thus a great gulf fixed and across that gulf no 
missing link has ever leapt. Suppose, for the sake 
of argument, that there was ‘“‘an evolution” of 
species. At the arrival of the soul in man, the 


136 DOES SCIENCE UPSET FAITH? 


evolution was interrupted. Just as Science is 
baffled by limitless time because limitless time ends 
in the God which Science cannot, or will not, dis- 
cover; and just as Science is baffled by limitless 
space because limitless space ends in God which 
Science cannot, or will not, discover; so is Science 
baffled by the soul because the soul is of the God 
whom Science cannot, or will not, discover. And 
in revealing God as the goal of time and space and 
as the breath of the soul, the Book of Genesis has 
transcended Science as the picture on a canvas 
transcends the colours on the artist’s palette. 
Science offers chemicals. It is faith that paints the 
sunrise. Science supplies ingredients. It is faith 
that illuminates the material in due proportion and 
unity. Science talks about species. It is faith that 
perceives the spirit. Great is Science; greater far 
is Omniscience. And in Omniscience was written 


the only Genesis of man and of the universe where 
he dwells. 


XI 
CAN THE HOME BE, PRESERVED? 


ERHAPS I may begin this difficult chapter 
by saying that I have just read of a church 
where the choir went on strike because the 

minister preached to his people against divorce. In 
a choir of thirty, the number of divorces had been 
seven; the leader himself, after divorce, had mar- 
ried a divorced woman; and a deacon, divorced 
three times, had married a fourth wife. 5o deeply 
was he hurt by the sermon that he found it hard 
still to attend the church. Yet it must be admitted, 
I think, that a minister, so situated, could only have 
dealt with so delicate a topic, under a compelling 
sense of duty. Had he withheld what Paul de- 
scribed as “the whole counsel of God,’ he would 
have been disloyal to Christ. And the mere fact 
that he gave pain does not mean that he was wrong. 
On the contrary, it suggests that he was right. 
When David sinned with Bathsheba, Nathan the 
prophet hurt him very much when he said, Thou 
art the man. And when Paul exposed the irregu- 
larities of the Church in Corinth, the Corinthians 
did not like it. And it was from experience, there- 
fore, that the apostle warned Timothy of a time 


137 


138 CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 


when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after 
their own lusts shall they heap to themselves 
teachers, having itching ears. It was because they 
would not endure sound doctrine that their civilisa- 
tion collapsed. And any civilisation which turns a 
deaf ear to sound doctrine is in danger of the 
same doom. 

In these countries of ours, there are two kinds 
of people. First, there are those who ignore the 
Christ; secondly, there are those who obey Him. 
The fact that none of us can wholly ignore Him 
and that few of us have wholly obeyed Him does 
not obliterate the distinction. There is, today, as 
clearly as ever there was, a choice between accept- 
ing Jesus of Nazareth as King of kings, as Lord 
of lords, and rejecting Him. Between the way of 
Christ and our own way, we must decide. For this 
reason, Christ Himself, announced a definite dis- 
tinction between the civil law of marriage and the 
rule of His Church. Legislating for an entire 
nation, Moses granted “a bill of divorcement.” 
He so granted it because men’s hearts were hard. 
And according to Christ Himself, Moses was justi- 
fied. In other words, without Christ, we cannot 
attain unto the Christian life, which life includes 
Christian marriage and is itself enshrined in the 
Christian home. In France, where, substantially, 
secular science has triumphed over faith, the very 
word home is unknown and the race is deliberately 
committing suicide. In India, you have not the 


CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 139 


home, but the zenana, and in Turkey, the harem. 
In the United States and the British Dominions, 
there are millions of real homes, where Christ is 
honoured and obeyed, but we also find that wealth, 
whether of mind or of money, tends to obscure the 
Christ. The home becomes less important. In- 
stead of a continuous and normal residence in such 
homes, we find a resort to hotels, to apartments 
without nurseries and to exaggerated travel, some- 
times to Europe, more often in the automobile. In 
periodicals which are supposed to be highbrow and 
circulate, therefore, among young men and maidens 
in college, and especially among those who wish to 
be thought intellectual—where it is noblest to be 
merely human—we read specious pleas for what, 
in plain terms, is nothing other than successive 
matrimony. Where Christ is belittled or elimi- 
nated from life, that must be the result. You may 
call it emancipation, if you like. But another word 
for it is decadence. And in the long run, it is the 
woman who will lose her heritage. Having given 
all to her husband, she will find herself in later 
years without security. 

Where there is “hardness of heart” and a 
denial of Christ, “the bill of divorcement” is 
sometimes, as He said, the only alleviation. In- 
deed, it is to forestall such cases that the Apostle 
told us not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers, 
and the Jews were constantly warned against mar- 
riage with pagans whose standards were different 


140 CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 


from the law of Moses. Precisely what should be 
put into the bill of divorcement is a matter which 
Christ leaves to the conscience of the community. 
But where one party has openly deserted the other, 
or is insane, or in prison, or a drunkard, or a drug- 
addict, there appears to be clearly a case of what 
He called “ hardness of heart,” in which case the 
victim is entitled to relief. Nor is it in the power 
of any court, whether of divorce or of crime, to 
cut off the offender from the love of Christ. To 
the spiritual life of a Samaritan woman who had 
had five husbands, He devoted an especial atten- 
tion; it was the spiritual life that she needed; but 
He did not hesitate to tell her that she was living 
with one who, in His sight, was not her husband. 
In helping the sinner, He did not condone the sin, 
and so far from eliminating the seventh Command- 
ment from the Decalogue, He emphasized it, de- 
claring in the Sermon on the Mount, that the 
command was broken in intent by a mere look. 

But the best way of counteracting a false stand- 
ard of marriage is, perhaps, to study the true 
standard. It is with good, not evil, that we can 
overcome evil. From the second best, let us turn 
to the best itself. 

It is sometimes said that Jesus was not a scien- 
tist, but I have always found that “ the Galilean,” 
as they called Him, had at His command whatever 
science he needed for His teaching or other public 
work. The terms in which He discussed, let us 


CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 141 


say, the processes of our digestion were completely 
scientific, and it was as a scientist that He advised 
us over marriage. ‘In the beginning,” said He of 
easy divorce, “it was not so.” Not in any dogma 
of church or synagogue, not in any emotions of 
the respectable and the orthodox, did He discover 
the supreme sanction of marriage, but in the world- 
wide and unchallengeable realities of race. “ Male 
and female,” declared Christ, “ created He them’ 
—one man for one woman; one woman for one 
man ; the cold, clean mathematical argument against 
plural marriages, whether they be simultaneous, as 
in the Orient, or successive, as some would desire 
to see them in the West. It was supreme sociology. 
It was the Word of God, quick and powerful as a 
two-edged sword, that cut the sophistries of selfish- 
ness to ribbons. 

Nor was it in a world of fancy that this ideal 
was developed. ‘The law was hammered on the 
anvil of experience. Some have doubted whether 
Samson could have slain a thousand Philistines 
with the jawbone of an ass. But no one has ques- 
tioned his ruin under the seductions of Delilah. 
Others have objected to the candor with which the 
Bible describes the scandals which stained the lives 
of patriarch and prophet and king in the Old Testa- 
ment, but no one has supposed that the scandals 
themselves were invented. If Christ declared for 
a certain kind of marriage, it was because every 
other kind had been tried and had failed. The 


142 CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 


course of true love may not always run smooth, 
but the course of false love must end in a ship- 
wreck for somebody. When Abraham, in his old 
age, accepted Hagar, as sceond wife, there was un- 
happiness. When Jacob multiplied his marriages, 
there was unbrotherly intrigue. And Solomon 
could not be the good king that he wanted to be 
because he was a bad husband. All the arguments 
in favour of the marriage of mere impulse which 
we hear today were heard then. And what de- 
cided the matter was not the fact that easy mar- 
riage and easy divorce were looked upon as 
shameful, but the fact that they were incompatible 
with the greatest happiness of the greatest number. 
IT am acquainted with a family in which the records 
of births, marriages and deaths have been kept for 
four centuries, and may now be studied in a printed 
volume. Hundreds of marriages are there set 
forth, but I doubt if there is one divorce. Of 
those marriages, in so far as I was able myself to 
observe those of later generations, nine out of ten 
were happy—obviously happy; and in the case of 
the tenth, it may be said without fear of contradic- 
tion that whatever trouble there was would have 
been accentuated if the union had been dissolved. 
I cannot think of one case in which divorce would 
have improved matters. ‘The worst of the bad 
jobs was better than quitting it. 

It is now generally admitted that, in advance of 
marriage, boys and girls should be told about them- 


CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 143 


selves. They who say that a former policy of con- 
cealment was bad, are right. But, to me at any 
rate, it is strange that the very advocates of a 
wholesome frankness in these matters, should be so 
often the people who argue that the Bible cannot 
be inspired because it mentions the mysteries of 
sex. These critics close the Scriptures because they 
are shocked and then write books which, in so far 
as they are wise books, say the same as the Scrip- 
tures, only in other and often weaker words. 
There is no fact about oneself of which the dili- 
gent reader of the Bible can remain in ignorance. 
It is a book at once without prurience and without 
prudery. On the one hand, you have in the Song 
of Songs the very rapture of a genuine romance. 
And elsewhere you will find the utter shame of a 
guilty passion. Nor is the young man left in the 
slightest doubt as to the nemesis which follows an 
abuse of the simple laws which govern our race. 
The wages of sin, he is told, are death, and in the 
Book of Proverbs the perilous wiles of the strange 
woman are contrasted with the more abundant joy 
which is to be found in a true wife. For a gener- 
ation that neglects the Bible, other instruction may 
be required. But if the Bible be read, it will be 
found a sufficient guide to the secrets of our being. 
It is not because the Bible has concealed these 
things that some of us fear the Book. On the con- 
trary, it is because the Bible gives us the truth, the 
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, which truth 


144 CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 


strikes us as a dash of cod water. ” Quicken 
me according unto thy word.” ‘The intimacies of 
wedlock, the gift of children and their natural nur- 
ture are fully explained and to these noble sinceri- 
ites, some of which we are so foolish as to eliminate 
from our prayer books, Christ added His unchal- 
lengeable imprimatur. The idea that such phe- 
nomena of human life be left to the publicity of the 
theatre, the studio and the bookstall, and should 
be excluded from the Church and the Sunday 
school, was not His idea. The fact is that, in this 
candor as in other matters, we have not the cour- 
age, the audacity to attempt the imitation of Christ. 
The Te Deum, as rendered into the vulgar tongue, 
contains the glorious and resounding line—‘‘ Thou 
didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb,” every word 
authorised by the lips of Christ Himself, every 
word frank and open as we say we ought to be 
frank and open over such matters. But modernism 
will not have it. ‘The advocates of a liberal relig- 
ion, based upon science, are afraid of the blunt 
word, womb. It must be suppressed as impolite. 
And the heralds of evolution are the very people 
who think it rude to sing a great song about the 
birth of man. All the jargon about anthropology 
and ethnology and heredity and species falls flat on 
the ground before truth when truth is told in a 
phrase that a child can understand. The advocates 
of an enlightened faith dare not even pray for 
children in the marriage service and stagger at the 


CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 145 


dreadful but strictly scientific word, procreation. 
Yet they will saturate their minds with the sensual- 
ity of novels and dramas which reek with the phe- 
nomena of immorality. It is only in church that 
they blush—not at the theatre—not at the opera— 
and certainly not over a book, other than the Bible. 
The mid-Victorian lady who wrapped cretonne 
around the legs of her pianoforte was a pioneer of 
the dawn compared with the obscurantists of our 
present intellectual caste. All that she said was 
that the mysteries of sex were too sacred to be 
revealed except in a shrine. But in the shrine, she 
faced life. And it was life unspoiled by an irrev- 
erent publicity. 

‘Neither Our Lord nor the Apostle Paul offers 
us any particular advice as to whether we should 
marry or remain unmarried. Both the Master and 
His apostle recognise that a man and a woman may 
have to choose between the opportunity of marriage 
and the claims of a career or of public service. But 
the teaching of Christ is, however, insistent on the 
principle that if a marriage take place, the parties 
fully and frankly accept its whole responsibilities. 
The husband and wife are not mere companions; 
they become one flesh. Even if he leave his father 
and mother, a man must cleave unto his wife, and 
in loving his wife, a man loves himself. That love 
is no less sacred and compelling than the love of 
Christ for the Church, elsewhere described as His 
Bride. Marriage is thus second to no other Chris- 


146 CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 


tian mystery in its tender holiness; it is an exquis- 
ite association of unlikes, man and woman giving 
and receiving, protecting and trusting, guiding and 
obeying one another, in a harmonious partnership 
of mutual honour and affection. Whether the mar- 
riage be arranged, as was Isaac’s; or be a marriage 
of convenience, as was Ruth’s; or be a love-match, 
as was Rachel’s; is less important than the accept- 
ance after marriage of its obligations. ‘To estab- 
lish a home, where life may be lived in health and 
honour, under one’s own vine and figtree, that was 
the object of the two help-meets. 

And the glory of the home was the presence of 
children. To be without sons, without daughters, 
has been to the Jew a poignant sorrow. And Christ 
Himself could think of no more terrible incident in 
a Jerusalem doomed to destruction, than this—that 
women would count themselves happy who had 
known nothing of motherhood. Here, on this 
planet, God has set the human race, and has invited 
us to multiply and to replenish the earth, which is 
even today only peopled by a small percentage, say 
one-twentieth, of the inhabitants who, if the re- 
sources of the world were wisely developed and 
justly distributed, could dwell here in peace, in 
plenty and in happiness. In our great cities, it is 
doubtless difficult to bring up children. Rents are 
high. A family is a formidable expense. But that 
is not God’s doing. It is simply that our Jerusa- 
lems, like the old Jerusalem, are beleaguered. If 


CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 147 


man wanted so to do, he could raise that seige and 
liberate that city. 

Not that an avoidance of children is always due 
to the above conditions. It is often among the rich, 
rather than the poor, that the family is smaller than 
the census demands if the nation is to continue. 
Husbands and wives who have plenty of room for 
children, except in their hearts, and plenty of 
money, prefer artificial pleasures, the pride of 
social prominence—how empty it is, after all!— 
the excitement of continual change, to the steadying 
and beautifying task of rearing boys and girls in 
the image of God. It is literally a fact that, to the 
imagination thus perverted, there is more interest 
to be found in breeding a horse or a dog than in 
educating a child. The animal is preferred to the 
living soul; and we then ask why such marriages 
sometimes break down. Defy the laws of nature, 
and the breakdown is bound to come. We talk 
about reconciling religion with science. It is not 
religion that needs to be reconciled with science; it 
is fashion, it is selfishness, it is display of wealth, 
it is refusal of duty. These are the things that run 
counter to science, that provoke the diseases of 
affluence, that shatter nerves, that send multitudes 
to the hell which they profess to deny, though 
themselves they have made it. Unless these pre- 
tentious hypocrisies are corrected and there be a 
return to the old paths, the ruin which has over- 
taken much of Europe is certain to be visited upon 


148 CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 


much of America. Establish the home—that is 
the inescapable task, if a nation is to continue. 

It is a task that tests our courage and our pa- 
tience. But, in the wisdom of Christ, we may avoid 
failure. Most of His life was lived at home. The 
eldest son in a large family, He served for many 
years as the breadwinner. It was this service that 
perfected His character. We, whose life consists 
of such service, are thus treading His path. Many 
a husband and many a wife have renewed their 
waning affection for one another by finding in 
Christ the cure for incompatibility. In each, He 
brings forth the best—controlling the temper, as- 
suaging the worry, revealing occasions of happi- 
ness and sweetening the bitterest sorrow. The 
little foxes—said the Preacher—how they spoil 
the vines! Christ defends our vineyard against 
the petty inroads of irritating routine. Where a 
marriage has broken down, the result must be 
accepted, and none of us is so far without sin as to 
be authorised to cast a stone. But I know of no 
greater happiness than the memory of a marriage 
in which one was able to prevent the quarrel pro- 
ceeding to extremes. That is the sacred function 
of Christ’s Church and her ministry, whether lay 
or ordained. And in saving the threatened home, 
we preserve the nation. 

Finally, be it said that half the marriages which 
fail ought not to have been solemnised in the first 
instance, Young people meet, are attracted to one 


CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 149 


another, obtain a license and get themselves wed, 
without consulting the parents on either side, with- 
out any consideration of income and expenditure, 
without any provision for furnishing a home, and 
certainly without any recognition of the fact that 
marriage, like other affairs, should be “ begun, 
continued and ended” in Christ. Most ministers 
of the Gospel insist upon a reverent, if often per- 
functory, ritual of marriage but, from time to time, 
the entire ordinance is brought into contempt by 
some minister who is so false to the standards of 
Christ as to make of marriage a spectacular stunt, 
conducting the service in an aeroplane, or at the 
base of some statue or even, as part of a perform- 
ance on the stage. I have come across a program 
of vaudeville in which one of the items was a 
marriage, repeated in one town after another, in 
which two of the artists were united by a local 
minister who, of course, received a handsome fee. 
Heaven knows that the local ministers were hard 
pressed for the money. But a resistance to such 
offers is fundamental to the faith. As for min- 
isters who gabble the service—I have read of a case 
where three of them raced through it for a prize— 
they should remember that “the Lord will not hold 
him guiltless that taketh His name in vain.” Such 
scandals bring discredit upon the Church ‘and are 
particularly unfair to the main body of preachers 
who would not dream of so far forgetting what is 
due to the call of Christ. 


150 CAN THE HOME BE PRESERVED? 


Tio young people about to marry, the English 
Mr. Punch said, “ Dowt!” I cannot endorse that 
counsel. As the keenest flame is the lightning, so 
the noblest love is love at first sight. But, so lov- 
ing, give yourselves the test of time. Wait a few 
months in order to be assured that it is really love 
which has overshadowed you. ‘The heart is de- 
ceitful above all things and desperately wicked. 
Then, mistrust the heart until you have counted the 
beats. You lose nothing; you gain respect for 
yourselves and for each other. And when you 
marry, do it openly. Have no secrets. Start fair, 
as at Cana of Galilee. The ring is, I know, merely 
a matter of form. But it is, I think, a pity that it 
should not be the plain gold ring which is every- 
where recognised as a symbol of the marriage 
bond. Marriage is not a fancy or a fashion. 
It is one of the eternal things in life, the same 
—just the same—yesterday, today and forever. 
As for the Protestant churches, they will be 
shattered beyond recovery if they leave to the 
Roman Church this task of maintaining marriage 
and insisting upon the duty of a parent. Here is 
the acid test of all that we have inherited from the 
Reformation. God grant that we do not flinch. 


XII 
WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 


HERE are not a few people, today, who tell 
us that they cannot believe in Christ because 
the churches supported the World War. As 

Prince of Peace, they declare that Christ has failed 
and that His followers behave as if they knew it. 
When war breaks out, Christians on one side fight 
against Christians on the other, and each side is 
supported against the other by prayers to the same 
God of Battles. Until there be an end to these 
hypocritical inconsistencies—so say these observers 
—we will not believe. I will state, therefore, as 
clearly as I can, what I have found to be the teach- 
ing of the Bible and of Christ concerning war. 

I begin by admitting, frankly and without reser- 
vation, that for every failure in loyalty to Christ, 
His followers should hang their heads in shame. 
When people who profess and call themselves 
Christians receive or offer a bribe, whether in in- 
dustry or in politics, when they take to themselves 
what is more than is due and offer to others what 
is less than is due, there is committed one of those 
sins against the Holy Ghost of which Christ says 
that there is no forgiveness, either in this world or 


151 


152 WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 


the next. The grafter has thus to face the ques- 
tion—what shall it profit him if he does gain the 
whole world, and lose his own soul? Into the city 
of God, there shall in no wise enter anything that 
defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, 
or maketh a lie. And it is not a matter of small 
moment that the continent of Europe, to which the 
Gospel was first carried by Paul, accepted and then 
handed on to others, should be the continent where 
militarism has been most highly developed and 
most destructive in its results. How is this to be 
explained or condoned? 

To begin with, we must be accurate in our state- 
ment of the facts. ‘This Europe, where men 
“ fought like beasts at Ephesus,” was never Chris- 
tian, except in name. Today, it is not even an 
ecclesiastical Europe. And not one person in ten 
spends ten minutes a day on the Bible. It was not 
the Churches that enlisted and equipped the armies; 
it was the statesmen. From the Churches, there 
arose a constant plea for brotherhood, a plea which 
we hear today, but the followers of Christ, many 
of whom were entirely faithful in their witness, 
were dismissed as emotional idealists. If you say 
that war is wrong, then it is as much your duty to 
stop it as it is the duty of a Christian. Our Lord 
did not come to cancel the conscience of mankind 
but to rally it against evil; and to his own con- 
science, each man, whatever his beliefs, is respon- 
sible. It is true that the ex-Kaiser is a Christian. 


WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 153 


But it is a mere travesty of the Gospel that he 
preached, and the travesty merely served cleverer 
men than he as camouflage. 

It was not religion that inspired Germany to 
war. It was the pride of an intellectual caste which 
believed that their own science and their own 
scholarship had superseded the Scriptures. They 
thought that they could offer the world an 1m- 
provement on the Christian faith. What they did 
offer was an improved method of slaughter. In 
the mind of the East, where religions are reckoned 
by the mass, not by the individual, a war in Europe 
is simply a war in Christendom. But the more 
accurate student draws a distinction between the 
armies of General Ludendorff and the armies of 
General Booth. Ina sense, Edith Cavell and Hin- 
denburg are both of them included in the Church 
of Christ. But as Christ explained, that Church is 
like a net, cast into the sea, which gathers of every 
kind. And wise men, in their estimates, are careful 
to separate the good from the bad. 

If armaments have been highly developed in 
Fiurope, the reason is simple. ‘To Europe Christ 
offered a more abundant life, and in Him Europe 
achieved a vast emancipation of the mind. As the 
Light of the World shone forth, prejudices, super- 
stitions and ignorance were dispelled; and there 
were discovered new uses of machinery and metals 
and other products. Use these things rightly and 
they are a blessing. Use them wrongly and they 


154 WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 


are a curse. Let us suppose that a man goes into 
a hospital for an operation and is cured of his 
weakness. If he is a good man, he comes forth 
stronger in the service of society. But if he is a 
bad man, he comes forth stronger to injure society. 
The reason that we arrest criminals and put them 
in prison is not that they are ill in health, but be- 
cause they are active and skillful; and if a husband 
maltreats his family, it is no kindness to them for 
a professor of physical culture to develop his mus- 
cles. The more fully we know about chemistry, 
the more in peril are we if the chemist is not a 
Christian. He takes a lump of coal and derives 
from it certain by-products. These may be applied 
to the manufacture of drugs that heal, of coiours 
that beautify or of cosmetics and perfumes that 
charm. But by a trick of the laboratory, those 
same by-products may be used to develop a 
poison-gas, of which one drop on the human hand 
will slay the entire body. Science may be salvation ; 
but it is often suicide; and the bigger the ship, the 
more important is it that it shall not be a battleship. 
Hence, as it seems to me, the folly of those who 
accept from Christ all that He has given the world 
of material enrichment while rejecting His divine 
claim to be Lord of All. The more abundant our 
blessings, the greater is our danger if they be 
abused. 

Jesus Christ was born the Prince of Peace. But 
neither He, nor any of His disciples, ever said, or 





{ 
i 
{ 
, 
: 
| 
. 
’ 
| 


WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 155 


thought that there would be a speedy end to war. 
On the contrary, Our Lord went so far as to insist 
that He came not to bring peace but a sword. 
Nation would rise against nation and brother 
would deliver brother to death. I will not here 
repeat what was written in The Vision We Forget, 
a former book of mine, of the amazing descriptions 
of a modern battlefield which St. John the Divine 
gives us in the Book of Revelation—descriptions in 
which artillery and bombs are plainly indicated. 
Christ had this foresight in Himself and He in- 
spired it in others. To call Him an idealist is 
completely to understate His profound sagacity. 
Within Him was the sub-conscious memory of the 
creation of the universe and He understood, there- 
fore, what His Apostles called “the patience of 
God.” He proclaimed the Kingdom of Heaven. 
But He knew that it would take time for this king- 
dom to develop, like leaven, within the meal of the 
old world. The problem which puzzles us—how to 
apply the ideal to the real—was the problem which 
confronted Him. And He solved that problem. 
The first question which Christ had to answer 
was whether or not His disciples were to withdraw 
from the world altogether. So cruel was the 
Roman Empire that this seemed to be almost the 
only solution. But Christ rejected it. It was no 
order of Eremites and ascetics that He founded. 
Behold, said He, I send you forth as sheep among 
wolves. And again, I pray not that thou should’st 


156 WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 


take them out of the world but that thou should st 
keep them from the evil. In other words, it was 
not in his choice of occupation that the follower of 
Christ would differ from other people, but in his 
character. Whatever calling was permitted by the 
law, he was entitled to pursue. So far as I am 
aware, there is no instance in the New Testament 
of any soldier abandoning the military life on his 
conversion. I am merely stating a fact when I say 
that of the soldiers who came to John the Baptist, 
no such surrender of their profession was de- 
manded. ‘The centurion who, at the Cross, saw in 
Christ the son of God, yet remained, so far as we 
know, a centurion. And while Cornelius of the 
Italian Legion became a Christian, he did not throw 
up his commission. In his hired house at Rome, 
St. Paul was chained to two soldiers, but there is 
no suggestion that he persuaded them to desert. 
And the Philippian jailor, who also would have 
been a soldier, was left in charge of the jail. In 
the Roman army, there was actually a Christian 
Legion of an especial gallantry, in which the sol- 
diers were indeed martyred, but not because they 
refused to fight for the Emperor. About their 
fighting qualities, there was never a hint of doubt. 
And their offence was that they declined to worship 
the Emperor as a Deity. 

The evidence is thus overwhelming that, from 
the first, it was held to be possible for a Christian 
to serve his country in a belligerent force. If the 





WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 157 


profession of a soldier had been a criminal profes- 
sion, it is unlikely that St. Paul would have written 
his famous description of the Christian armour. 
Doubtless his language was symbolic, but even in 
symbol, we do not talk of a Christian burglar or a 
Christian assassin. In armies and navies, there 
have been multitudes of men whose consecration 
to Christ was manifest, even on the battlefield 
itself. ‘The part which a soldier has to play is 
often misunderstood. That he takes life is obvi- 
ously the fact. But he also offers life, and Greater 
love hath no man than this, that he lay down his 
life for his friends. It is the soldier’s readiness to 
sacrifice himself that brings him often so close to 
the Crucified. We look at the soldier’s deed and 
say truly that it is dreadful. Christ looks at the 
soldier’s heart and finds that the man is innocent 
of hatred. 

So with the prayers for victory. Doubtless these 
prayers are often couched in language of a tribal 
patriotism. But here again, we need to look be- 
neath the surface. Amid a storm, the sailor, who 
would never think of praying when he is ashore, 
falls on his knees and begs for safety. And so is 
it in time of war. If victory is demanded of the 
Almighty, it is because victory seems to be the only 
defence. When the French prayed for victory 
over the Germans and the Germans prayed for 
victory over France, both the French and the Ger- 
mans were really praying for a common blessing, 


158 WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 


namely a secure frontier. In war, the language of 
aggression is only the oxygen that stimulates. It 
is not the inner impulse. And these prayers for 
victory illustrate the deep wisdom of Christ’s 
words, No man cometh unto the Father but by me. 
Without Christ, men may, and often do, pray for 
what they want. But without Christ, they cannot 
and do not pray as brethren, living together in a 
Father’s home. 

As long as armies and navies are recruited on the 
voluntary principle, no follower of Christ need 
enlist unless he so desires. A question of con- 
science does arise, however, when the state imposes 
a compulsory draft for naval or military service. 
Rather than serve under such compulsion, many 
men were imprisoned and some were shot during 
the late war. ‘There is indeed a definite text on 
which members of the Society of Friends rely when 
they eliminate these professions from those which 
a Christian can consistently follow. My kingdom, 
said Our Lord, as He stood before Pilate, is not 
of this world, else would my servants fight—words 
which, if they stood alone, might be regarded as 
final. But the sentence, thus usually quoted, is not 
the whole sentence. It concludes with this—lest I 
be delivered unto thee. And that there be no doubt 
as to the importance of the addition, Christ went 
on to say, Therefore they which delivered me unto 
thee have the greater sin. In other words, His 
arrest was unresisted, and because they knew it 


WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 159 


would be so, His accusers had the greater responsi- 
bility for ordering it. This passage, therefore, 
settles one definite question. It is not by the sword 
that the Christian faith must be propagated. And 
it is not by the sword that the Christian Church or 
the Christian cause must be defended. The cru- 
sade must depend not on force but on love and the 
wisdom which love inspires. This is the principle 
upon which missions are today conducted. And in 
their conduct, there is here, at any rate, a complete 
obedience to the will of Christ. If, then, there are 
young men, today, who have decided in advance 
that they cannot serve the state in any future war, 
their duty is plain. Let them submit, here and 
now, to Christ’s alternative draft. It was not “an 
opinion” of war or of anything else to which 
Christ called us. It was service. And in dealing 
with conscientious objectors, the state was by no 
means so unfair as some have assumed. The 
Christian who served Christ wholly in some mis- 
sion field, at home or abroad, was seldom, if ever, 
asked to slay. His service was too valuable to be 
lost. And if Christ were to be found in some city, 
as He was found in Capernaum, going about doing 
good, He would be asked to heal, to comfort, to 
forgive, but He would not be asked to bear arms. 
To the prospective objector, therefore, I say, 
“‘ Serve as He served, and it will be the same with 
you. If you cannot conscientiously make the su- 
preme sacrifice for Ceesar, it means that you cannot 


160 WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 


conscientiously make anything less than the su- 
preme sacrifice for God. Yours is a special call. 
You must leave your father, your mother, your 
wife and children, your lands and property, as the 
conscript soldier has to leave them, in order to 
obey it. Otherwise your conscience is not a master 
to be obeyed; it is an excuse.” 

The conscientious objector must become, then, 
the conscientious crusader. He must enlist in a 
new war, not against flesh and blood but to save 
flesh and blood. It is a war, not fought by some 
men against other men, but by all men against prin- 
cipalities and powers and the rulers of darkness. 
It is a war in which the Lord is still the Lord of 
Hosts, but the hosts are armed for the hospital, the 
college and the school, not the trench and the aero- 
plane. Jehovah is still the God of Battles but His 
battles are fought with despair and cynicism and 
disease. Still is the Almighty our strength which 
teacheth our fingers to fight, but the weapons held 
in those fingers are the X-ray, the lancet and the 
dressing for wounds. It is a fight for the life of 
others and the last enemy that we shall conquer 
is death. 

With every disciple who so enlists in the war 
for life against death, there is less likelihood of 
a war for death against life. When an Ameri- 
can philanthropist builds a hospital in Tokyo or 
Pekin, he establishes a fortress for peace. No 
oriental, healed in that hospital, can ever again 


WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 161 


hate the nation which made the gift. Step by step, 
as Christ promised, love is thus fulfilling the law. 
But this does not mean that, during the period of 
transition, there shall be anarchy. On the contrary, 
it was in the Sermon on the Mount itself—that 
document which so many misquote and so few have 
read—that Christ took His stand for an inexor- 
able enforcement of law, including even imprison- 
ment for debt. Verily I say unto thee, He declared, 
thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou 
hast paid the uttermost farthing. ‘The Sermon on 
the Mount was not a gospel; it was the most exact- 
ing legal code ever issued by a legislative author- 
ity. Be ye therefore perfect, said He, even as your 
Father in heaven is perfect. ‘The only circumstance 
that makes the Sermon on the Mount tolerable is . 
this—that Christ died for the sins of us who come 
so far short of it. 

Accurately interpreting Christ, as he always did, 
St. Paul emphasised the law as the foundation of 
society. And he spoke with respect of the magis- 
trates who bear not the sword in vain—which, in- 
deed, was written to the Christian actually residing 
in imperial Rome. In the New Testament, there is 
thus no warrant that I can discover, for the policy 
of refusing co-operation with the state in the main- 
tenance of order and civil justice such as was 
practised in India by Mahatma Ghandi. On the 
contrary, Christ approved the payment of tribute 
to Cesar, and as a Roman citizen, it was to Csesar 


162 WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 


that Paul, though a Jew, appealed. The personal 
virtues of Ghandi may recall the imitation of Christ 
but there is nothing of Christ’s statesmanship in 
his boycott of the civil power. What Christ said 
to Rome was not that Roman roads and Roman 
baths and Roman laws were wrong, but that they 
were not enough. ‘There were sick to be healed. 
There were blind whose eyes should be opened. 
There were children to be educated. It is so much 
easier to agitate grievances than to undertake the 
tasks that would remove them. 

Between the use of force to preserve order in one 
nation and its use to preserve order in all nations, 
there is no distinction in ethics. And it was not 
Christ Who at any time, when He discussed the 
Jewish Scriptures, denounced the slaughter of the 
Amalekites, however terrible may have been that 
event. They who reserve all their sympathy for 
the Amalekites are guilty of a fundamental injus- 
tice. For centuries, the Jews had been subject to 
raids along their border, of an appalling ferocity. 
Men had been killed, women and children had been 
kidnapped. And the hideous practices of an idol- 
atry that included human sacrifice were included 
in the fate reserved for the captives. If George 
Washington, if Abraham Lincoln, if Theodore 
Roosevelt and if Woodrow Wilson had been con- 
fronted by that situation, I doubt very much if 
their statesmanship would have differed from Sam- 
uel’s. It was not an un-Christian act to stop the 


WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 163 


piracy in the Mediterranean which was carried on 
by Algerians. Nor was it Christianity in Europe 
that preferred peace to the prevention of wide- 
spread massacre by the Turk. Until love prevails 
over all else in the world, there will be inevitably a 
legitimate use for organised force. And it is for 
the Christian, as citizen, as voter, as policeman, as 
judge, as soldier, as sailor, to use his influence, as 
he would in business or any other sphere of activ- 
ity, for justice. Once recognise the principle that 
an army must fight for nothing save justice, and no 
army will ever fight again. For justice, when ob- 
served by all nations, can be applied to all nations 
by an impartial court. So with crime. The day 
will come when not a prison will stand, save as a 
memory. 

In the proclamation of such a_ brotherhood 
among men, the Bible has been thousands of years 
in advance of the blue books. It was Isaiah who 
declared that the lion should lie down with the 
lamb, so seeing a league in which the large and the 
small nations would meet on terms of mutual 
respect and equality. I believe that Isaiah, when 
thus he wrote, was literally inspired by God Him- 
self. If the world had so believed, there would 
have been no World War and twenty million lives 
would have been saved. But the scholars came 
along and politely disposed of Isaiah’s divine 
authority ; and naturally the statesmen in their turn 
were only too ready also to sweep him aside. As 


164 WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 


Christ said, If they will not believe Moses and the 
prophets, neither will they believe 1f one shoud 
rise from the dead. It is, however, significant that 
the militarism in a nation varies directly as its 
ignorance of the Scriptures. 

The three great armies in the world today are the 
French, the Russian and the Japanese. These 
armies are recruited by conscription in countries 
where the Bible is unknown to the mass of the 
people. But in the countries which have received 
the English Bible, there is not today one conscript 
army and the volunteer forces are best to be de- 
scribed as police. If the Bible were as honoured in 
Moscow and Sofia as it is in Wales or Ontario or 
Virginia, the problem of war would be settled. 

For what Isaiah recognised was that the way to 
stop war is to use your munitions for some other 
purpose. Turn, he said, your swords into plow- 
shares and your spears into pruning hooks. lf we 
built all the railroads that need building, there 
would be no steel left for guns and battleships. If 
everybody had the healing that is needed, there 
would be no chemicals left for poison-gas. It is not 
the settlement of disputes alone that will stop war. 
It is the establishment of a new era when disputes 
will not be any longer thought worth while. 

Take the late war. Lump together all that any 
nation hoped to gain by the disaster and you would 
not find that the whole lot meant as much to any 
several nation as, let us say, the recent cure for 


“ a 
> le ae 


WILL WARS EVER CEASE? 165 


diabetes. A little bit of territory, here or there, is 
important to this or that nation merely because we 
so think it. But the kingdom of happiness is 
within us. The frontiers of that kingdom are 
health, knowledge, virtue, friendship. And com- 
pared with these things, what men fight for is as 
dust in the balance. 


XIII 
DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 


y F I were to write an overwhelming argument 
against the Resurrection, it would make no 
difference. Mankind would still refuse to be- 

lieve that Christ is dead and that His Body, buried 
in the new tomb of Joseph of Arimathzea was there 
corrupted, decayed to a skeleton of dry bones and 
became, finally, part of the dust of the earth. The 
Easter Greeting of old Russia, Christ is Risen! has 
suggested something to the world, which once sug- 
gested, is ineradicable. In China you may visit, 
silent and remote, the tomb of Confucius. ‘Tell the 
Chinese that Confucius is not there, and they would 
be insulted. Go to Medina and deny the presence 
of the body of Mohammed and you will not escape 
alive. It is, indeed, the Mohammedan who guards 
with meticulous care the tombs of Abraham and of 
the other patriarchs who were laid to rest in the 
still preserved Cave of Machpelah. But ask a Mo- 
hammedan about Christ and he will answer that 
the sepulchre of Christ is empty, that Christ is 
alive, and even that Christ will return to Jerusalem, 
walking from the Mount of Olives on the edge of 
a sword. Somehow, Christ is different. 
166 


DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 167 


Indeed, it is often the people of no religion at all 
who convince me that Christ is still abroad in the 
world. Doubtless, He still encounters opponents, 
men and women who would rather be proud and 
rich and powerful in hell than poor in spirit and 
merciful, anywhere else; but the people I meet are 
not all like that. Let me give a few instances: I 
know a man—he is on a great newspaper—who 
thinks that all I believe is “ rot’ with an adjective, 
but is so ready to help others when they need help 
that I say to him: “ You are not the pagan you 
pretend to be, and you know it. You are a latent 
Christian.” Another of my friends on the press 
assures me that he is an atheist, but finds the Chris- 
tian faith more beautiful than his own barren nega- 
tions, and I say to him that he also is a latent 
Christian ; at which he smiles like a benediction and 
I know that he is near to God. I was stopped in 
the street one day by a man I had never seen before 
who said he was a dealer in real estate and asked 
me into his office. “I believe in Bradlaugh and 
Ingersoll,” he explained, “but I would rather be- 
lieve in Christ ’—and then this happened. Some- 
one else entered the office, to whom it appeared 
that my friend had advanced eight hundred dollars 
in loans, quite unsecured, to help him over a hard 
place. The lender was himself a person of limited 
means and I told him also, that in assisting another 
who happened to be down on his luck, he was a 
latent Christian, 


168 DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 


A British Ambassador at Washington once said 
to me that the surest way of making friends in the 
United States is to ask people to do you a service. 
They may not go to church; they may not believe 
the creeds; but within some secret shrine they cher- 
ish the Christ. They are latent Christians. I have 
seen much of the stores and the shops and the res- 
taurants and the hotels on both sides of the sea, 
and have often asked for various services in 
many cities; and the cheerful courtesy, especially 
of the young, their readiness to take trouble for a 
stranger, their patience if the stranger does not 
quite understand, is constant and daily proof that 
never have the fields been whiter for Our Saviour’s 
harvest than they are today. 

What I have called latent Christianity is no 
new phenomenon. When the two disciples walked 
to Emmaus and a Stranger overtook them, they 
were latent Christians. Their hearts burned within 
them “but their eyes were holden that they should 
not know him.” The disciples when they went 
a-fishing all night, were latent Christians, for the 
Christ on the shore seemed to them a Stranger and 
it was some time before they recognised Who He 
was and said, “It is the Lord.” Mary Magdalene, 
when she could see in the risen Christ no more than 
a kindly gardener, was a latent Christian; and per- 
haps the real gardener was kindly and just the kind 
of person whose part Christ has always been ready 
to play. Christ is thus the one amongst us whom 


DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 169 


we know not. There have been other great figures 
in the world—for instance, Buddha—but about 
none of them, today, have we this mystic sense of 
personal proximity. It is a Presence, as actual in 
the weak who are helped, as in the strong who 
help the weak. Inasmuch as ye did it unto one 
of the least of these, my little ones, ye did it unto 
me. No one, save Christ, ever said anything 
like that. 

There are some people who will have it that this 
latent Christianity is enough. And, assuredly, it is 
better to have a love that is latent than a love which 
is only on the surface. But if hypocrisy be a word 
that means wearing a mask; and it be hypocrisy to 
pretend to be better than you are, then it is also 
hypocrisy to pretend to be worse than you are; and 
a merely latent recognition of Christ is less than 
sincere. Hence, there are multitudes who—each in 
his own way—declare Him. They will not have 
it that He is no more than a spiritual influence, 
invisible to the eye. He is here, in the body. He 
can be described. He can be painted. His face 
can be sculptured. He has risen from the dead. 

Again, let us take examples: There was a poor 
fellow in Gautemala who was led forth to be 
hanged. He held in his hand a small object which 
he gave to a passer-by. It proved to be some kind 
of a nut in the soft wood of which he had carved 
with an exquisite skill the face of Jesus in minia- 
ture, crowned with thorns, a face suffering and 


170 DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 


sympathetic. To see that little masterpiece, tens of 
thousands in New York passed in a queue before 
the magnifying glass. If that criminal had kept to 
himself his adoration of the Saviour, nobody would 
ever have known and nobody would have been as- 
sisted by his evidence that in a desperate moment 
Christ had been his companion and his comfort. 
And what that man saw in Christ was not a spir- 
itual interpretation of the Resurrection. That 
would have been as much a mockery as a spiritual 
interpretation of the chains on his wrists and the 
rope around his neck. ‘To the condemned mur- 
derer, it was the resurrection of the body that mat- 
tered. What he saw on Christ’s brow was the 
drops of blood. And when all is said and done, we 
are, every one of us, condemned to death, many of 
us to a painful death; and as we proceed to our 
inevitable fate, happy are we if we can hand to 
some passer-by our slight imitation of the Christ 
Who has made the prison-house a palace of the 
worth-while. 

To show forth the Christ is becoming an im- 
pulse, wider than any church or creed. The other 
day, I met a producer of motion pictures who had 
been engaged on a film for the Salvation Army. 
“IT didn’t think it was fair,’ he said, “to show 
their work without showing the Person who in- 
spired it. So I thought of a scene at the old Knick- 
erbocker Hotel. Through a curtained door, the 
Christ appeared in silhouette, and when the door 


DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 171 


was opened, it was not really the Christ but a Sal- 
vationist whose shadow looked like Christ because 
he was going about doing good.” Here was a 
latent Christian who, in his calling as a producer of 
films, found it possible to reveal Jesus of Nazareth. 
Of what use would it have been to say to that man: 
“You have made a mistake. Christ only rose in 
a spiritual sense. You cannot photograph Him. 
That is contrary to the latest modernist teaching.” 
_ What that man had to have was the Christ who 
could face the camera. And Christ knew it would 
be so. Behold, He said, my hands and my feet, 
that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit 
hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. And 
when He had thus spoken, He shewed them Hs 
hands and His feet. 

And here I will-write with some frankness. I 
remember attending, one day, a conference of 
clergymen who passed a resolution in favour of 
prohibiting the exhibition of moving pictures on 
Sundays. It happened that, not long afterwards, 
I went to church on a Sunday morning. A most 
estimable preacher from a distance delivered an 
essay on good conduct and the service had this pe- 
culiarity—that the name of Christ was not men- 
tioned, in any hymn, prayer or other exercise, until 
the benediction, which was pronounced in the usual 
form. The preacher, well equipped in modern 
scholarship, had just overlooked the fact that it 
was Christ who had died for the congregation; 


172 DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 


indeed, Christ had, as it were, slipped his memory 
altogether. I then went to a moving-picture house. 
It was the Christmas season. ‘The vast theatre was 
crowded with a reverent and enthusiastic gather- 
ing. Christmas carols were sung. The Babe, with 
His Virgin Mother, was shown. And the “ Halle- 
lujah Chorus” rang out, declaring the Incarnate 
Child to be “King of kings” and “Lord of 
lords ”—this in a city where one-third of the people 
are Jews. Which of those edifices should have 
been closed on Sunday—the Church where the 
Christ was omitted or the theatre where the Christ 
was worshipped? Which was real—the Christ de- 
clared to the world or the Christ concealed by 
the Church? 

We who have to earn a livelihood as reporters 
and actors and entertainers are no better than we 
should be. We are often the publicans and the 
sinners of modern civilisation. As bondservants 
of the community we never know where we may be 
sent, what we may have to do, or in what sudden 
temptation we may be involved. Let those cast a 
stone who have successfully withstood such tests. 
But there is one Person whom we know to be all 
that He claimed to be, and He is Christ. We meet 
His critics and interview them and we draw our 
own sometimes cynical conclusions. If some fa- 
mous preachers could hear what the reporter says 
of them after he has jotted their latest views into 
his notebook and returned to his desk to write the 


DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 178 


piece, they would lose not a little of the com- 
placence which is ever induced by publicity. 

In discussing the birth of Our Lord, I explained 
that this event fulfilled an ancient yearning, by no 
means confined to the Jews, but widespread among 
the peoples of the world. So was it with His 
triumph over death. ‘The Egyptian was not satis- 
fied to leave his body to decay. He has embalmed 
for us those mummies in which mortality seeks to 
be immortal. And it was from Egypt that the 
Israelites came. Hence, the Psalmist’s plea: Thou 
wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou 
suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Deny 
that Christ rose from the dead and you are still 
left with that recorded aspiration and it would only 
mean that another Christ than He must come to 
satisfy our longings. In whatever way you read 
the Book of Jonah, this at least is plain, that he 
prayed for a life that would be stronger than death. 
The waters, he cried, compassed me about, even to 
the soul: the depth closed me round about, the 
weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down 
to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her 
bars was about me for ever; yet hast thou brought 
up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. 

Why is that passage so important? The reason 
is that, to our certain knowledge, Jesus of Nazareth 
pondered over it. We can put Him into the 
witness-box and hear His testimony. And we can 
establish beyond controversy the fact that He ex- 


174 DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 


pected to rise from the dead and often said so. He 
told His disciples that the sign of the prophet Jonah 
would be the only sign granted to an evil and 
adulterous generation which did not want to be- 
lieve. As Jonas, so He declared, was three days 
and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the 
Son of man be three days and three nights in the 
heart of the earth. Nor did this utterance by Our 
Lord stand alone. ‘That He would be killed and 
rise again the third day was the burden of His 
later teaching. It was the final taunt of the people 
when He was dying on the Cross: Thou that 
destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, 
save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come 
down from the cross. ‘The very reason why the 
Jewish authorities sealed the tomb was their knowl- 
edge that “this deceiver” had pledged Himself 
that, within three days, He would leave it. 

Faced by this prospect, the mind of mankind of 
that day was identical with the mind which we 
discern today. The disciples, who might have been 
expected to believe, were discouraged and sceptical 
and by their very piety suggested that Christ would 
stay dead. Hence the new tomb, hence the spices, 
and hence the astonishing circumstance that not one 
disciple was at the sepulchre (and some are not 
there today) to see the thing happen. Hence, more- 
over, the equally astonishing circumstance that the 
witnesses who were there, belonged to the Roman 
army which carried out His execution, and that the 


DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 175 


seals on His tomb were affixed by the Jewish 
authorities who instituted His trial. A belief in 
the Resurrection was thus present in the world, the 
hostile world, days before it dawned upon the 
Church. And Peter, John and Thomas had to be 
summoned by the women and shown the empty 
tomb before they would credit the occurrence. 

At a later date, the world discovered, not only 
that Christ risen was a fact, but that it was a very 
disturbing fact. And vested interests, thus alarmed, 
began to challenge the evidence. But never did 
His opponents attempt to find His body; never did 
they think it worth while to examine His tomb. 
All they did was, by bribery, to endow a negative 
scholarship which taught that His disciples stole 
Him away. In other words, their scepticism of 
Christ risen made them sceptical of the best and 
most honest men then living. Because they ne- 
glected His Deity, they also denied their own hu- 
manity. With Christ still dead, everyone else had 
his price. ‘Today, nobody believes in that tale of 
fraud. By standing as witnesses of the Resur- 
rection, the Apostles vindicated their own char- 
acter. As Mary, the Mother of Our Lord, has 
been the noblest of all women through her cour- 
age as a witness to the Annunciation, so, in the 
epistles of Peter, you see what majesty illumi- 
nated men whom unbelief declared to be thieves 
and body-snatchers. Those stupendous documents 
are as overpowering as Christ’s triumph over the 


176 DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 


tomb. ‘Try to write such another letter, and you 
will understand. 

I do not know whether I am able to suggest to 
others how Christ rose from the dead, but in pre- 
senting the case to my own mind, I am wholly 
content to accept everything of knowledge which 
is offered by science. For that new knowledge, 
summed up, is precisely nil: Science has, indeed, 
discovered for us what “matter ”’ is like and how 
“matter ’’ behaves and even the possible construc- 
tion of “‘ matter’; but the answer of science to the 
ultimate question what “matter” is, can only be 
described as one hundred per cent. ignorance. Just 
as science has nothing to tell us of what lies behind 
the past, or of what lies before the future, or of 
what lies beyond distance, so science is silent when 
asked what lies within the uttermost atoms of our 
being. 

Not long ago, I had the privilege of a conver- 
sation with Charles W. Eliot, for forty years Presi- 
dent of Harvard University and a distinguished 
scholar and chemist. I pressed him to say whether, 
in his long life of ninety years, he had discovered 
or heard of any new knowledge of the nature of 
matter? His answer, as I understood it, was one 
word, “ Nothing!’’ Here, then, is that fascinating 
phenomenon, a brick wall, and the physicists and 
the chemists and the philosophers, after running 
their heads against it, know no more of what it is 
than the bricklayer who handled the bricks and laid 


DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 177 


on the incomprehensible mortar. We can pulverise 
those bricks and reduce them to dust and scrutinize 
each particle. We can declare that the particles are 
composed of atoms and that the atoms are com- 
pounded of electrons, but whether the brick be par- 
ticles, atoms or electrons, makes no difference to 
this—that its secret is inviolable, belonging to 
God alone. 

As with the bricks, so with those wonderful ma- 
terials out of which God has built that body of ours 
wherein, as in a temple, is enshrined the soul. If 
we believe that God created the heavens and the 
earth, then we must perforce repeat the question 
which St. Paul put to King Agrippa: Why should 
it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God 
should raise the dead? Why? 

The body of Christ was in every sense a human 
body. In the sepulchre, it lay dead, an utter corpse. 
From that body, the soul had been wholly reieased. 
But over that body, as over the body of Lazarus, 
the God in Christ was absolute master. If He 
claimed His body, it was for a simple and sufficient 
reason. He hada further use for His body. And 
His body obeyed the summons. No hand was 
needed to unwrap the funeral cerements. When 
the body within them fled, they lay undisturbed. 
And no eye could see the body, save by His su- 
preme will, yet when seen, when touched, the body 
was found to be no ghost but true flesh and blood. 
What, then, was the reason why Our Lord again 


178 DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 


entered that torn and wounded shrine of His soul? 
It was the reason that led Him to be born of a 
Virgin Mother. It was, in one word—Love. For 
in His Resurrection, Jesus uplifted the race. The 
Christ, who could return to His dead body and 
arouse it to vitality, arresting the processes of cor- 
ruption, and restoring its interrupted energies, 1s 
able to change our vile bodies, cleansing us from 
corruption and securing for us, at every stage of 
our existence, here and hereafter, that temple of 
the spirit which is suitable for the service that it 
will be our happiness to render unto the Almighty. 
This is what was meant by those who declared that 
we are risen with Christ. It is a resurrection that 
begins, here and now, and that never ends. Just 
as none, save He, could control His Body, even in 
death, so no one, save He, need control Our bodies, 
be it death or be it life. Whatever happens to our 
personality, He is able to guide us through the un- 
knowable. As St. Paul expresses it, we shall never 
be found naked for we know that if our earthly 
house of this tabernacle were dissolued—as in cre- 
mation or in the fury of battle——we have a build- 
ing of God, not made with hands, eternal in the 
heavens. Or—in a sentence—our mortality—that 
which dies—ts swallowed up of life. 

Thus do we rise again, fully arrayed in the gar- 
ments that we need. We are not to be disem- 
bodied; on the contrary, it is to be a resurrection 
of the body. But when we ask: How are the dead 


DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 179 


raised up? and with what body do they come? St. 
Paul rebukes us sharply, answering: Thou fool. 
The death of this mortal body is merely the sowing 
of a seed; but the rise of the body immortal is the 
breaking forth of flower and fruit. In a moment, 
in the twinkling of an eye, we are changed, from 
corruption to incorruption, from mortality to im- 
mortality, from dishonor to honor, from weakness 
to power. I believe in the resurrection of the body, 
and I also believe that the body, thus raised, is like 
unto the glorious body of the Lord Jesus Christ. 
Thus does He bridge the chasm between this life 
and the life hereafter across which mankind in all 
ages has vainly endeavored to leap. Where the 
Egyptians attempted to preserve their mortal bodies 
in immortal sepulchres; where the Chinese rever- 
ence the spirits of their departed ancestors; where 
the spiritualist seeks to see and to hear the body 
that shall be, and where the common people cherish 
strange stories of ghosts and apparitions for which, 
in their accumulated mass, there must be some 
scientific basis, Christ fulfilled even the supersti- 
tions of our race by wearing our nature on His 
throne. And from this it follows that, today, He 
is touched, not alone by a memory of those infirmi- 
ties of ours which He shared with our race two 
thousand years ago, but by the very present sym- 
pathy of One Who is still, here and now, our 
Companion in sorrow and joy. The latent Chris- 
tian is the man who is accompanied by the latent 


180 DID CHRIST RISE FROM THE DEAD? 


Christ. And with Christ thus abroad in the world, 
the body which, with Him, we wear, is safe. If 
we die, He also died. If we watch another die, it 
is in the certain hope that what we have committed 
to the tomb or scattered to the winds—for it makes 
no difference—will be safe in His keeping. Death 
is robbed of its sting. Our home is not broken up. 
We remain forever our individual selves. And 
our individual selves are forever enshrined in that 
vehicle of service and of happiness which is best 
designed for the spheres, whatever they may be, 
where He invites us to dwell. 


XIV 
WILL CHRIST COME, AGAIN? 


THINK I may fairly claim that in these pages 
there is no need for me to enter into the de- 
tails of that difficult subject which we call 
prophecy. In a previous volume, The Vision We 
Forget, I have offered a layman’s analysis of The 
Book of Revelation, and, whatever be the value of 
that book, nobody can say that I have been afraid 
of the topic. Anyone who wishes to pursue the 
matter can there find out what I think of the time, 
times and a half in Daniel, of the number of the 
beast, and of the four horses of the Apocalypse. 
And on the present occasion, what I have to do is 
to write for the person who goes to work in the 
morning and returns home in the evening; for the 
wife and mother; for the college boy and the col- 
lege girl; and I have to answer their simple ques- 
tion what is meant by this Second Coming of 
Christ. I must confine the discussion to the few 
plain essentials. It must be a first lesson only in 
the mystery of the future. 
If [ am unable to dismiss prophecy from my 
faith, it is because Christ considered that prophecy 
was important. Evidently He wished us to under- 


181 


182 WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 


stand His plan of campaign. He did not want us 
to be taken by surprise, to fight His battles blindly, 
to run His race in blinkers; and for this reason, He 
took us into His confidence. Henceforth, He said, 
I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not 
what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; 
for all things that I have heard of my Father, I 
have made known unto you. In these prophecies, 
then, so often despised, so often wrested from their 
simple meaning, we are admitted into the cabinet 
council of the Almighty. We learn the innermost 
state secrets of the Eternal. It is a diplomacy, so 
open that it must be divine. 

In their investigations of the past, the geologist 
and the antiquarian delves into the dust of centuries 
and expends millions of money. Why is the future 
less important? Let us suppose that there had been 
no prophecies. The critics of the faith would have 
urged that a fundamental speculation of mankind 
in all ages had been ignored by Him Who under- 
took to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And 
the criticism would have been just. Of what sub- 
stance is faith unless faith can see through the 
curtains of time? I sometimes wonder whether 
they realize what they are saying who tell us that 
we should be guided wholly by science. What is it 
precisely that science tells us of the future? Let us 
examine It. 

According to the strict conclusions of science, we 
may assume, I suppose, that the world must one 


WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 183 


day come to anend. The moon is also a world but 
whatever life there may have been on the moon is 
now, so far as we can see, extinct. With every 
whiff of a volcano and every tremor of the seismo- 
graph, our planet is exhausting its primal heat. 
Whether the air that we breathe will be dispersed 
in space, and whether the earth on its ambit will 
lose impetus and be drawn by gravity, as by a link 
of elastic, into the sulphurous regions of the sun, 
who can say? But that the universe changes, how- 
ever slowly, is certain. It is by a terminable lease 
that mankind occupies his speck of planetary dust. 
And there could not be, surely, a more saddening 
pessimism than this—which concludes the labours 
of mankind, the struggles, the sufferings, the hopes, 
the fears, in one final consummation of cold, of 
heat, or of asphyxiation. If this is to be our fate, 
and if the thermometer and the barometer are to 
be the new deities to be placated, then let us eat 
and drink, for tomorrow we die. Indeed, the fore- 
going is an understatement of the case. For it 
might be argued that while science certainly con- 
demns the race to a final extinction, the individuals 
of the race, myriads of them, survive elsewhere, 
immortal. Let this speck of planetary dust exhaust 
its heats and dissipate its atmosphere. There are 
everlasting mansions prepared for those who desire 
them. But it is not science that tells of a future 
life. It is faith. And if science be really the sole 
teacher, we must assume not only that the race 


184 WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 


perishes but that every individual in the race, as 
he or she dies, perishes also. Our bodies wear 
out. And our planet wears out. And the rest is 
annihilation. 

Now, the statement that the Lord Jesus Christ, 
Very God of Very God, is returning to this planet 
in person at His own time, for His own purpose 
and in His own way, is a staggering challenge to 
the alternative of annihilation. To ultimate chaos, 
there is a choice—the ultimate Christ. His spirit 
is still in command of created matter. He holds 
the key of the prison-house. Be it next week; be 
it ten thousand years hence; be it in this Body or 
in that Body; Christ is coming—and, as Browning 
puts it, “all’s well with the world.” 

Inevitably, then, there will be people who at times 
will gaze into the future. And sometimes these 
star-gazers will stumble over the next step. He 
who hazards the ascent. of Mount Pisgah in order 
to survey the Promised Land, must be assured of 
a steady head. Along these dizzying precipices, 
many a spiritual sanity has been impaired. Yet the 
fact that Mount Pisgah has its perils does not mean 
that Mount Pisgah is merely a cloud on the 
horizon, rendered solid by an emotional mysticism. 
Nor is Mount Pisgah a hillock onto which weak- 
minded enthusiasts clamber, so imagining them- 
selves on the summit of Mount Everest. ‘To make 
a molehill out of a mountain is as unscientific as it 
is to make a mountain out of a molehill. It is 


WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 185 


doubtless true that, in the Early Church, as in the 
Church of today, there were Christians who put a 
date, indeed an immediate date, to the return of 
Our Lord. But it is not by its small men that any 
movement has been or can be judged. The ques- 
tion is what the leaders taught the small men to 
believe. And about this teaching, | am unable my- 
self to entertain a doubt. Our Lord expressly in- 
sisted that it was not for us to know the times and 
seasons ; that His coming would seem to be delayed ; 
that the love of many would wax cold; that while 
nation would rise against nation and there would 
be wars and rumors of war, the end would not be 
yet; and that His followers must not be misled by 
cries of “‘ Lo, He is here,” or “ Lo, He is there.” 
Equally emphatic was St. Paul. In a letter to 
the Thessalonians he used words which were inter- 
preted by that Church as meaning that Christ 
would immediately return; and without a moment 
of delay, St. Paul wrote a second letter to correct 
this unintended impression. Whatever may be our 
interpretation of the symbolism employed by St. 
John the Divine in the Apocalypse, it is at least 
certain that he foreshadowed a prolonged period 
of elaborated war, of revolution following revolu- 
tion, of communication through the air, of an 
emancipated yet not always consecrated woman- 
hood, and of a widely organised dissemination of 
the Scriptures. He expected a history that should 
differ wholly from his own environment—a history 


186 WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 


only to be described in a language of simile, the 
truth of which has struck, as by a blow, the writers 
of Europe who have lived through the last decade. 

The Apostles were not the simple-minded fools 
which sometimes we are apt to think them. If 
Peter or Paul were to visit some of our universi- 
ties today, they would be well able to hold their 
own in conversation. And I am ready, if you 
wish, to close the Bible, and open the newspaper, 
and from the facts which we read at breakfast, 
deduce the certainty of Our Lord’s return to reign. 
I will not dwell on that ethnological miracle, the 
continuance of the Jewish people, unique among all 
nations, which fulfils prediction. I will not here 
draw any conclusion from the simultaneous capture 
of Jerusalem, the fall of the Caliphate and the im- 
pact of new America on old Europe, which events 
appear to many people to bear a prophetic signifi- 
cance. I will be content with one simple illustration 
which the whole world understands, namely the 
Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the 
United States of America. 

For the purposes of this illustration, let us take 
it for granted that alcoholic liquor is an evil. Now, 
in this evil, society for a long period acquiesced. 
There was an unchallenged surrender to drink, and 
if the drunkard was noticed at all, it was merely as 
a jest. This was, then, the first era when every- 
body accepted an evil without even realising that it 
was evil. The conscience was asleep. 


WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 187 


Next there arose certain personal abstainers from 
drink. They were only individuals and their in- 
fluence—to quote Our Lord’s simile—worked like 
leaven in a barrel of meal. We have a second era, 
of conscience aroused, but only in a minority. 

Time passes and an ever-increasing number of 
persons disapprove of drink. And, at last, these 
persons form the main body of the nation. Con- 
science is now no longer in a minority, but in a 
majority ; and this is the third era. 

The conscience of the majority is next expressed 
in votes. The question of prohibiting liquor be- 
comes a political issue. A law to that effect is 
carried and we have a fourth era—that of con- 
science legalised. 

There is still a minority, however, which chal- 
lenges the conscience of the community and per- 
sists in using alcoholic liquor And we have, 
therefore, to face a fifth era, namely, conscience 
enforced. When that era is concluded and con- 
science triumphs, we may fairly say that Our 
Lord’s Prayer is answered and that God’s will is 
done on earth as it is done in heaven. 

The abatement of intemperance is but one ex- 
ample of betterment. What is true of drink is also 
true of slavery, of drugs, of graft, of crime, of 
gambling, of vice, of every thought and deed that 
degrades our race. In fact, it is true of the inner 
and inclusive malady which we call Sin. Behind 
the skirmishes on the surface of history, there lies 


188 WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 


the profounder struggle between right and wrong, 
to be summarised as: 

(1) Conscience asleep; 

(2) Conscience awake in the minority; 

(3) Conscience extended to the majority; 

(4) Conscience expressed in law; 

(5) Conscience, as law, enforced. 

Now change the word Conscience to Christ and 
we have the story of our faith. Here it is: 

(1) Christ not yet born; 

(2) Christ obeyed by the few; 

(3) Christ accepted by the many; 

(4) Christ expressed in law; 

(5) The law of Christ enforced. 

We have thus five eras of conflict and victory. 
In the first era, evil was not effectively challenged. 
That was the situation before the birth of Christ 
and it is still the situation in any land or in any 
community where Christ is unknown or ignored. 
Over wide areas of India, of China, of Africa, evil 
is still simply accepted as necessary. 

When Christ came, the second era began. There 
was a protest against evil by individuals. And 
taking the world as a whole, we are still living in 
that second era. The disciple of Jesus, say in Rus- 
sia, is still the exception and not the rule. Heisa 
light in the darkness and a city set on a hill that 
cannot be hid. And nearer home than Russia, it 
cannot be yet said that nations as nations have ac- 
cepted the obedience of Christ. 


WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 189 


Still there are signs, here and there, that the third 
era of movement towards organised reform, is 
developing. ‘To many specific evils, the law, how- 
ever imperfectly enforced, is now opposed. And 
to an increasing extent, Christ has public opinion 
on His side. Society seems to be preparing for a 
fourth era when there shall be a definite effort to 
suppress known evil, and in particular to stop that 
evil of all evils, namely, war. There is a League 
of Nations. There is advocacy of a League to 
Enforce Peace. There are negotiations for limit- 
ing armaments. The dawn of a better day seems 
to be breaking. 

Now, these actual developments of society, with 
which we are all familiar, have never been de- 
scribed with such fascinating symbolism as in 
the Bible. It was Christ’s own method—this of 
making hard things plain by parable and without a 
parable spake he not unto them. St. John the 
Divine in his Revelation followed the example 
of Christ and also spoke in parable. And if it 
had not been for what he wrote, I myself would 
never have arrived at an orderly conception of 
what history means. The course of events is a 
vast and a complicated medley of rumor and of 
fact. Here one is able to see the one comprehen- 
sive design. 

We now talk about a League of Nations. St. 
John called it a thousand years of peace or a mil- 
lenium. The thing that he prophesied is the thing 


190 WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 


that Viscount Cecil and the late President Wilson 
and General Smuts have been trying to work out. 
Precisely what was meant by St. John when he 
wrote of a thousand years, I will not here discuss. 
Elsewhere, I have offered a view. Enough that 
he had the profound vision to see that a millenium, 
consisting of external peace among nations, how- 
ever admirable it be in itself, would not last for- 
ever without challenge. In the fourth era, you 
prohibit war. But you have still to enforce the 
prohibition. Right may be at last enthroned but 
wrong is still strong enough to rebel. 

Hence the millenium is followed by a last battle 
—precisely the kind of battle that the United States 
is having today over Prohibition, only on a vastly 
bigger scale. This is the Battle that St. John calls 
Armageddon—where, as it were, the Devil, break- 
ing loose from his chain as Napoleon broke loose 
from Elba, meets his Waterloo. ‘‘ The devil! ”’— 
you cry—“who in these days believes in the 
devil?” Well, it happened that as I was revising 
these pages, I picked up a current copy of The 
Century Magazine. It was by mere accident (or 
design) that I opened the magazine at a sentence 
by Alexander Meiklejohn, the former President of 
Amherst, who, I think, would hardly be described 
as a fundamentalist or conservative interpreter of 
the faith. Yet he says, “As for the devil, I am 
sure we need, and have a right to the truth which 
was expressed in terms of him.” If good is a 


tie eg 


WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 191 


person called God, then I can see no reason in logic 
why evil also should not be personal. 

It is when we have won Armageddon that we 
begin to see the City of God rise eternal on her 
foundations of established truth and justice. We 
have the end of the fifth era when goodness is 
accepted, not because it needs any longer to be 
enforced but because at last people realise that in 
goodness alone can they expect to be happy. The 
rebel wrong is no longer organised. And individ- 
uals who perish in evil cannot now plead that they 
are compelled so to do by the system or by environ- 
ment. On the contrary, the system or environment 
now makes it hard to go astray and easy to keep 
straight, and the man who prefers evil, is himself 
solely responsible for choosing it. In the interests 
of society, there comes a moment when such an 
offender against the public weal must expect to be 
excluded. When Christ has won His long fight 
for the race, an ultimate defiance by those who still 
refuse His authority, cannot be and will not be 
tolerated. Theirs is what St. John calls the second 
death. It is not the death of the body. It is the 
suicide of the soul. If they decide for darkness 
against light, they must find the darkness outside. 
It is not that Hell is imposed on them. They 
insist on having it. 

Now, if there had been no Bible written at all, 
that great drama, with its five acts, would still have 
been the inevitable masterpiece of history. And 


192 WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 


in that drama, Jesus of Nazareth dominates the 
stage. Who were the men that, in days of Baby- 
lon and Nineveh, proclaimed ideals which inspire 
the forward looking statesmen of the twentieth 
century? ‘They were the prophets and heralds of 
the Messiah. Who were the men that, when He 
came, turned an old, bad world upside down? 
They were the witnesses of His resurrection. 
From which communities, today, originate the 
armies of light and healing and comfort? ‘They 
are the communities where, however distantly, 
Christ is seen, and however imperfectly, Christ is 
served. And is it unreasonable to assume that He 
who has hitherto filled the stage of history will be 
seen not less clearly than hitherto in the days of 
His cumulative conquest over wrong? As the final 
acts are announced, is He suddenly to vacate the 
stage? As His army overwhelms every other force 
in the world, is the host to find itself without a 
Leader? Is Christ to be killed a second time or is 
He to be seen and worshipped a second time? To 
me, there can be only one answer to these questions, 
that He Who came once to save is coming again 
to rule. 

Naturally I ask, as others have asked, how He 
will come and when? In such enquiries, there is 
no harm. If you expect a friend, you like to know 
whether he is to arrive by train, by car, by aero- 
plane or on foot. But if you cannot say for cer- 
tain which way he will come, you can still make 


WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 193 


sure that you have a room ready for him when 
he does arrive. They who anticipate a speedy 
return of Our Lord should be the most eager to 
combat social and personal evils of which, when 
He does return, He cannot but disapprove. The 
pre-millenarian who omits to make plain the path- 
way of His God should drop any further talk about 
a literally inspired Bible. It is the men and women 
that labour to put an end to the employment of 
children in factories and similar abuses, who are 
the true believers in the Second Coming of Christ. 
At any rate, they are the people who have con- 
vinced me. 

That an event of stupendous significance is to be 
expected as history advances, seems obvious. The 
telephone, the telegraph, the photograph and the 
radio are only the preliminary efforts of science in 
the direction of what will be ultimately an universal 
sight and an universal hearing among mankind. 
Every deed done anywhere will be seen every- 
where; and every word said anywhere will be aud- 
ible everywhere; and one man will be able to speak 
to the entire race. The whole of this dumbfound- 
ing development has been achieved within the life- 
time of men, still amongst us. It is as if, after 
thousands of year of racial slumber, we had been 
suddenly awakened to our senses. 

They who dismiss as an idle tale the hope of 
Christ’s Coming are thus confronted by events 
which seem to revive the significance of the prophe- 


194 WILL CHRIST COME AGAIN? 


cies which had been so nearly abandoned. He will 
not come until His welcome is assured, but the 
sooner we assure that welcome, the happier will be 
the world wherein the Almighty has given us a 
home. He that yearns for the Christ will cleanse 
his own habits, will balance his own accounts, will 
pay his own just debts, will serve his neighbour as 
himself, will be, in one word—ready. Of every 
hope we have, this is the most practical. It means 
that we live, not in a sunset, but in a sunrise. We 
have the day ahead of us. We watch the dawn 
and glory in the great call to be His comrades. If 
we are to reign with Him, it means that, with Him, 
we are to love one another. 


XV 
Is THE TRINITY A MYTH? 


ND thus do I come to the end of my task. 
To these pages, I would apply the rule that 
also applies to sermons and creeds and 
hymns, namely, that whatever fails to reveal the 
Christ should be forgotten. As the monasteries 
in the Middle Ages were tried by this test, so must 
the theological college and the clergy, there trained, 
be tried in our own day. It is not for me to say 
whether our sacred erudition is a shrine that dis- 
plays the Christ or a sepulchre that entombs Him. 
No sepulchre and no shrine can hold Him any 
longer from the people. I hope that I am not in- 
tolerant of opinions other than my own. But let 
us realise this—intolerance is not confined to the 
orthodox. ‘Torquemada was a model of tolerance 
compared with, Robespierre or Lenin. All the more 
honour, then, to those who, disagreeing with this 
book, have read it for whatever good they may 
have found therein. 

I have had to decide for myself, first, the broad 
question whether or not I am to have a religion at 
‘all? This question I cannot answer otherwise than 
in the affirmative. It happens that the religion 


195 


196 IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 


nearest to me is the religion of Christ and I know 
none other, at a distance, that I would be likely to 
prefer, if I had the opportunity of studying such 
an alternative at first hand. I therefore accept, in 
broad terms, the Christian religion. Within that 
religion, that which is nearest to me, physically, is 
a book, called the Bible, and it is with the Bible, 
therefore, that I begin my practice of the faith. If 
I were to be crippled and debarred from church, | 
could still read the Bible, and if I went blind, I 
could still hear the Bible; and if I also went deaf, 
I could still remember what I had heard and what I 
had read. It is, then, the Bible and the Christ 


Whom I find in the Bible that matter to me; He, 


and none other or less than He, is the life that I 
would like to live. From this, it follows that a 
ceremony or a theological term, however venerable 
or expressive it may be, is not a matter which I am 
under any necessity of defending or explaining 
unless I find it in the Bible. Much that people 
criticise in what they believe to be the Christian 
faith, is not yet in my faith, and never may be. 
Nor do I pause for an instant to dispute over 
words which have never been the words of the 
Bible. About terms like transubstantiation, pre- 
millenarianism, the immaculate conception, apos- 
tolic succession, paedo-baptism,—be they Catholic, 
be they Protestant—I say nothing, good or bad. 


The terms in which Our Lord and His Apostles. 


made the faith so plain to men of their own day 


= 


IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 197 


are terms which would make the faith plain to us if 
we confined ourselves to the use of them. Unless 
a new word clarifies an old meaning or suggests a 
new meaning, it is not an improvement of language. 
And other things being equal, the longer the word, 
the worse is the literary style in which it is adopted. 

It happens that I was reared in a Church which, 
however rigidly orthodox it may have been in 
belief, did not in fact make use of creed of cate- 
chism or confession. In this abstinence from 
formulas, which practice we shared with the 
Society of Friends, we thought, at any rate, that 
we were following the mind of the Master Who, 
in His dealings with the disciples, depended on 
personal contact. In the opinion of Napoleon, con- 
stitutions should be short and obscure, and among 
historians, it has always been a question how far 
constitutions should be written or unwritten. In 
the Nicene Creed and the Westminster Confession, 
multitudes have seen a safeguard of faith. Others, 
not less firm in the faith, have doubted whether any 
such formularies can be relied upon as a defence. 
When the war broke out, men trusted in walled 
cities, with forts around them. Within a month, 
it was found that no city could be thus defended 
and the conflict was transferred to the open field 
and the improvised trench. So with religion. The 
day when we could get inside a church and sit 
secure behind our creeds and articles of religion is 
over. Our innermost parlours are flooded by the 


198 IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 


fresh air or the poison-gas, whichever way you re- 
gard it, of radio. For the Christian soldier, like 
the civil soldier, there is now required a new stand- 
ard of courage. There, in No Man’s Land, he is 
under fire and he must dig himself in. It takes 
time. It takes trouble. But it is worth while. 

A simple illustration will, perhaps, make matters 
clear: We all know the definition in Euclid of a 
straight line as the shortest distance between any 
two points. That is an unquestioned dogma of 
mathematics. But to learn that dogma off by heart 
and to recite it like a parrot does not mean that 
you can draw a straight line. Only an artist can 
do that. So with the creeds. They are the geom- 
etry of life. But only a saint can live that life; and 
so to live, says St. Paul, is Christ. It is not by 
reading botany that the branch puts forth grapes. 
It is by belonging to the vine. Christ is the Vine, 
we are the branches, and without Him we can do 
nothing. 

To refrain from the use of creeds is thus one 
thing; to deny the faith that the creeds express is 
quite another. It is, indeed, better to have the 
faith without the creed than to retain the creed 
without the faith. Just as a prayer is an offence to 
God when it is vainly repeated, so, as it seems to 
me, is a creed wrongly used unless it be sincerely 
recited. Anyway, I should not care myself to 
repeat any creed unless I believed it in the sense 
of the words, usually accepted, for it is the com- 


IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 199 


mand of Christ that our “ yea” should be “ yea”; 
and our “nay,” “nay”; for whatsoever is more 
than these cometh of evil. No one could have 
been more particular than He over precision of 
language. He said that it was by our words we 
should be justified and by our words, condemned, 
and even for our idle words, we should be called 
into account. What a preacher is to do who has 
subscribed to articles of religion in which he finds 
that he no longer believes, yet who hesitates to 
abandon his adopted profession, it is not for any 
other than the man himself to say. It is a situ- 
ation that has to be faced sometimes on newspapers 
as well as in churches. But in commercial life, a 
bargain ought to be a bargain and the courts do 
not allow the terms of a bargain to be interpreted 
in a symbolic or liberal sense by one of the parties. 
It is because I cannot honestly subscribe to various 
articles of religion which I do not find in the Bible 
that I have not joined a certain Church. I am 
unable to take the view that words, so solemnly 
inscribed and published, can be treated otherwise 
than I should treat the words in any other serious 
document. 

There is one and only one theological term, there- 
fore, unknown to Scripture, about which it is my 
intention here to say a word. I refer to the Trin- 
ity. It is true that the word “ Trinity ” was never 
used either by Our Lord or by His Apostles. But 
it is a word of special significance that appears in 


200 IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 


the calendar of many Communions and has been 
used as the name of many ecclesiastical and col- 
legiate edifices. The word is also suggested by the 
creeds, especially the creed of Athanasius, and it is 
implied, so at least it has been thought, in many 
texts of the Bible. For instance: you find the three 
Persons of the Trinity—the Father, the Son and 
the Holy Ghost—in such a passage as this: 
Father, into thy hand I commit my spirit. And, 
of course, the usual benediction by which we are 
dismissed after public worship is a statement of the 
Triune God. Marriage also is solemnised under a 
similar assumption, and, in many hymns, the Trin- 
ity 1s declared. I think it frank, then, to say in 
explicit terms what the word “ Trinity,’ or 
“Three-in-One ” has meant for me as a key to a 
deeper thought and broader vision, as I hope, of 
the Unseen. 

If I may speak frankly, I have been not a little 
astonished by the tone adopted towards this matter 
on the part of some preachers of credit and renown 
who claim a monopoly of the new knowledge. In 
dismissing the Trinity as a topic of no importance, 
these divines have evidently supposed that they 
were superior persons brushing aside the outworn 
dialectical “ junk,” if I may use such a word, of 
muddle-headed Hellenes in Asia Minor. My own 
impression of the scene is, I confess, not quite so 
flattering to the pulpit. I feel as if I were back at 
college, studying the higher mathematics and not 


IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 201 


always following the rapid operations which pro- 
ceed on the blackboard. Sometimes I failed to un- 
derstand the transformation of symbols. But it 
never occurred to me, on that account, to get up and 
say that the professor, who did understand, was 
talking rubbish, which, in the interests of science, 
should be swept away. Some, at least, of our 
recent theology, as presented from the rostrum, has 
resembled the comments of a freshman who thinks 
everything must be a mistake which his own un- 
trained mind cannot grasp. The acute intelligence 
of the Hellene in Asia Minor might well smile at 
the crudities of our comments on their explanation 
of God. I hope it is new knowledge. But much 
of it is, | am convinced, new ignorance. In ma- 
terialism, we are indeed grown men and women, 
but in Christ, we are babes, who should be fed 
simply and regularly with the sincere milk of 
the Word. 

I will put this question, then, to a test which 
every boy who sells a newspaper and every girl 
who answers a telephone can understand. Let us 
suppose that a magazine were to offer a prize to 
the person who should send in the best description 
of Light in one word. I will undertake to say that 
the money would go to the man who suggested the 
word Trinity. What is Light? It is what the 
French call a tricolor; it is red, blue and yellow, 
which are three, and yet it is one—it is thus three 
in one. I do not say that Athanasius was justified 


202 IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 


in condemning those who do not, and will not, see 
so obvious a proposition to “ perish everlastingly.” 
But I do say that they must be very stupid persons. 
Nor do I wish to spend much time on the Atha- 
nasian Creed. My Master is not Athanasius, but 
Jesus of Nazareth. But I have been interested to 
take this creed, and with the change of scarcely a 
word, transform its clauses intc ‘4 description of 
light. How does this read: 


And the scientific conclusion is this: 

That we see one light in three colours, and trinity 
in unity. Neither confounding the colours nor divid- 
ing the radiance. For there is one colour called red, 
another called blue ; and another called yellow. 

But the nature of the blue, the red and the yellow 
is all one; the glory equal, the majesty eternal. Such 
as the blue is, such is the red; and such the yellow. 
The red created; the blue created; and the yellow 
created. 

The red not yet comprehended, the blue not yet 
comprehended and the yellow not yet comprehended. 

The red eternal, the blue eternal, and the yellow 
eternal. 

And yet they are not three eternals; but one eter- 
nal; not three incomprehensibles, nor three creations; 
but one creation, and one incomprehensible. 


Now, what would you say of a sophomore who, 
after the severe strain of “a prom,” brought half 
his mind into a classroom where the lecture was 
on optics; and weary of mental exertion, inter- 
rupted the professor with this complaint: “ That’s 


IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 2038 


all jargon and rot about there being three colours 
in light. What matters is the fact that we can see. 
And the rest is a superfluous physical formula.” 
You would reply that the young man was a mental 
puppy whose eyes had yet to be opened. Yet I 
have myself received a letter from a student at one 
of the most famous theological seminaries stating 
in black and white that the friends there were not 
interested in the conservative reactions, or some 
such phrase, on theology. It is the attitude of the 
preoccupied sophomore. 

Now let us suppose that you had another com- 
petition in which the prize was to go to the person 
who in one word gave the best description of a man 
—say William Ewart Gladstone. Here, again, I 
suggest that the money would have to be paid to the 
contributor who submitted this same word—Trin- 
ity. For Gladstone was the son of his father. But 
then he was also the father of his son. And not 
less was he the husband of his wife. A father is 
not a son. And a son is not a husband. And a 
husband is not a father. Yet the father, the son 
and the husband are not three persons, but one 
person—once more a triune individuality—the 
complete man. And in terms of William Ewart 
Gladstone, you again rewrite the Athanasian Creed. 

I shall be asked—-“* Yes, but why worry about 
these subtleties?’ and it is an entirely reasonable 
question. Why worry about Science? Why worry 
about the Einstein Theory? The difference be- 


204 IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 


tween the natural scientist and the supernatural 
theologian is, after all, essentially this, that the 
scientist thinks it more important to know about 
what God has made than about the God who did 
the making, whereas the theologian puts a knowl- 
edge of God before all other knowledge. Between 
these attitudes of mind, you may take your choice. 

The conception of a Triune God has been in 
history a matter of life and death. They who, 
today, abandon it are treading a well-beaten and 
tragic path. Already there are in the world at 
least two hundred million entirely sincere persons 
who have rejected the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, 
the Atonement and all similar ideas. They are 
called Mahommedans. And their God is apparently 
quite simple, namely, Allah, a Great God who is a 
Creator, a Judge, a Power, a Fate, a Destiny. God 
commands; man obeys, and that is the end of it. 
What an obvious solution! A perfect idolatry 
without the idol. 

What has been the result? In the very regions 
where this simplified faith has predominated, we 
have seen in the Christian churches the most in- 
sistent loyalty to the ideal of a Triune God. What- 
ever may be thought of the Trinity in New York 
or London, there is no doubt at all about what men 
think of the Trinity in Tiflis and Baku. Christians 
there have seen and suffered from the appalling 
results of an incomplete knowledge of God’s love. 
For what is it that Islam declares? There are two 


IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 205 


dogmas, of which the first is that God commands; 
and the second is that man obeys. In other words, 
obedience must be merely human and authority 
alone is divine. It is thus power, and only power, 
that the Moslem worships; and to obtain power, he 
has used any and every means, however cruel. I 
am merely stating the literal truth when I say that 
a population larger than that of the United States 
has been sacrificed to the slaughter and enslave- 
ment inflicted over a wide area of the Old World 
by devotees of the prophet who accepted the lim- 
ited view of the Deity. As with the Eastern wor- 
ship of power, so with our Western worship of 
success. There is no distinction in essentials be- 
tween the Sultan and his Khalifas who multiply 
jewels and luxuries and display them to the people, 
and the kings of politics and finance and commerce 
who multiply mansions and expensive pursuits. 
All this, whether in the East or in the West, arises 
out of the vision of a God Who is merely rich, 
merely omnipotent, merely glorious in majesty; 
out of the assumption, therefore, that a man suc- 
ceeds when he is wealthy and fails when he is poor. 
The direct challenge to that false view of society is 
to be found in the doctrine of the Trinity. It is the 
very talisman of social justice. 

When Athanasius declares that the Son is equal 
in Deity to the Father, what was it that he really 
proclaims? He asserts that to obey is as godlike 
as to command, that to be employed is as honour- 


206 IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 


able as to be the employer, that to serve is as sacred 
a task as to be served. He deifies work. He takes 
the daily round and the common task and carries 
them clear through all obstacles into the very Being 
of the Godhead. If a Labour Party wants a char- 
ter, here it is—a Carpenter created the Universe. 
And because Father and Son are united in God, 
therefore Father and Son should be united on earth. 
All men are created equal, but all men should co- 
operate in the common pursuit of happiness. 

The parallel between the Trinity in Light and 
the Trinity in God is, indeed, curiously exact. The 
Blue is of a sky, overhead, and suggests the Father. 
The Red is of the blood in our veins and suggests 
the Son. And the Yellow is a pervading colour, 
without which, artists say, no landscape is com- 
plete, an exquisite hint of the Spirit, the right 
Spirit which should be present in all we undertake. 
So with the man who was, at once, father, son and 
husband; to be a husband suggests neither com- 
mand nor obedience, but companionship. It is not 
force alone that is divine. Persuasion is divine, 
love is divine, joy is divine, thought is divine, hope 
is divine. All these are the fruits of an adequate 
conception of God. 

That men have wrangled and even fought over 
formulas is a phenomenon by no means confined to 
religion. We need, therefore, the Holy Spirit, the 
Comforter. He also must be included in God. It 
is in a golden light that our landscape must be 


IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 207 


seen. To omit the Spirit from the Trinity is an 
error only less serious than that of the Moham- 
medans who also omit the Son. 

You may say that all this is poetry, but is poetry 
one of the things which, with religion, we are to 
obliterate? Is art, which is only noble in faith, also 
to go? Is music to be limited to the expression of 
that which science can discover and money can 
buy? If you eliminate what is hinted at in this 
book, what will be left of life? We shall have ex- 
changed York Minster and St. Mark’s, in Venice, 
for the mezzanine floor of a hotel where we only 
rise heavenward when we want to go to sleep. 

When Our Lord came, He looked at the Jewish 
faith and said that 1t was no new faith that they 
needed but a fulfilment of the old. And that old 
faith, including the great Day of Atonement on 
which He died, He did fulfil. It is not a new 
gospel that we now need. It is obedience to the old 
Gospel. There is a vast volume of sin that should 
be confessed and forgiven. ‘There is a vast reser- 
voir of hope that is still deferred and makes the 
heart sick. There is a vast surplus of energy that 
has yet to be harnessed, like water-power, for the 
benefit of the community. What is everywhere 
needed is just this—a Christian. And what every 
Christian needs is to be a better Christian. The 
idea that a smaller Christ should be called in to 
save a bigger, richer, gayer and more learned civil- 
isation is contrary to common-sense. What does 


208 IS THE TRINITY A MYTH? 


the Grand Central Railroad or the cotton-trade in 
Lancashire care for a mere rabbi who lived and 
died in Palestine, two thousand years ago? 

But He was not a mere rabbi. The very hysteria 
of those who say it suggests that they protest too 
much. Christ has now entered into the sub- 
conscious mind of the human race. He is going 
about doing good. We doubt or deny Him and 
then He finds us when we least expect Him. Every 
road is, today, a road to Damascus. You can never 
tell who will be the next Saul of Tarsus. I am not 
worrying about the faithh How and when He 
shows Himself to men is Christ’s business first; 
for me, to be “a living epistle”’ is, after all, to be 
no more than one of a million letters, mailed in 
life’s post office. Yet—to quote an old story— 
they whose instinct it is to say “Christ is no- 
where’? may wake up one day to find in their 
theology a mis-print. And when, in their lives, 
they read, “ Christ is now here,’ some of their 
difficulties will, doubtless, assume a different aspect. 





LT 
1 1012 01208 2840 








oer pyerty E 


emares SEE 


bras ereess 
eet itrth 
= 


TS 


SUS 


oes 


coeeeseeesets 
rivreeeeare os 


coat 


~ cex3 
rye ere tte 


corereceeeeeed 


Se 
Ste 
SISA 
etetrereres 
Tea tenstg te S 
oreearrty 


Petre tats 


; 5 aes 
a 

SS - t + 

~s 

Tey tess 


rye 

ra 2 +: 
Rzs—>* 

Rs 


bea Tote bre treks! 


ees 
cases eerietess 
eerpreretrarsereers 


aepeate eee 
Srey eetses 


Seasare te reese areeeees 
foresee benter estes 
Sint ats 
wis 


Stet 
SIS 


pepe 
Bit Sart erase Seargsseaeee 
Sata epee = SEES 


= 
ete ntti eet pess 


a SES 
ese ors 
ret 
picbeeesers comnepess towe 
wees 
pret 
prewar rentrsess 
Spears 
SECA OE hy 
Rieti ttc ieee ateeeeeat 
sSitetst 
: ptatitetetire tite 
tr ee esec ete: 


fh She Stier aise 
Ebest: irre "3 Siesta: pape 


eres 


Faby ress r} 
2 eee Sgaseeseees Saas 
ath meee te asters 
seers 
Seekeeat 
eet 
Ss 
brett to etree st yrs 
irearo 


mee 
seetaeas 
Ratesetres ee eces sateen: 
Race te orey oN oe are ager oa 


ae 


ae eee 
ees 


Risin aes 


egkah ve yh apes SSS Ses CceeteL yaaa teres 
mate? eet. 
Soin ty ep iets pret eet = shee SS sy ALTE Seg ee 
. ereere step chsh sess peessasss = i 
Be RES Bae: SSbo Sela ves: SS ET 
ekesteeatate ett tenes Soya ma 
Soe Seana See taat 

eta epi et S30 
Retesatht arse Sie; S555. = 
Seeetaeer ater eeat esitetees 
Stee teas 


Saas 

$i 

pee ce * 
peetehtcty 


Chet 
Steceth Soacent tate 

See eatecntee: 
Tore iene oe Seine eee e aS 
seceats are 
EeSeeasisiites ee ee 

cesar eee st 
eb testi beste tess 
S SUtataeat tae 


sees 
Myase pel reeirs 


coined corer 
presussguniteprarerpes pest ienerss 
S > es 
epee ttt wt 
Sasentis bets setebinet tt teehee 

hp sites bepeeeye Ss 


peyeery 


aitiette 


bapyeates 
Eats ies 


etheeeerereress 
Piaee bets 


——) = 


esaied 
barte ial 
Seer 
As GS tht 
Sees! 
~ ~ es seme tttre 
tees bt . 
Soitise Mocesiree 
=) oe 
eae tarietersante tite 
par be eeseereeseer tre: 


¥ 


a 


See 
: Esee tees 
rs 
eatery 
Seeaey <y ok 
Stresthbecerrsteay wees? 3 
ates 2 
rey oretess 
care 


AE 
Seartseeprseret 
a eseteyet 


spite eesatte 

os SLIT 
Reesebstaceonenseor 
eeerteccpete cated 





